Iceberg transport costs are one of the main ingredients of modern trade and economic geography models: transport costs are modelled by assuming that a fraction of the goods shipped "melts in transit". In this paper, we investigate whether the iceberg assumption applies to the costs of...

This paper analyzes the claim, made by both academics and by industry insiders, that vessels speed up under conditions of high freight rates and low bunker prices. The rationale for the claim is that a ship should move slowly when high bunker prices make energy cost savings great and when the...

We study the returns to owning dry bulk cargo ships. Ship earnings exhibit a high degree of mean reversion, driven by industry participants' competitive investment responses to shifts in demand. Ship prices are far too volatile given the mean reversion in earnings. We show that high current ship...

We study the returns to owning dry bulk cargo ships. Ship earnings exhibit a high degree of mean reversion, driven by industry participants' competitive investment responses to shifts in demand. Ship prices are far too volatile given the mean reversion in earnings. We show that high current ship...

Exporting firms do not only decide how much of their products they ship abroad but also at which frequency. Doing so, they face a trade-off between saving on fixed costs per shipments (by shipping large amounts infrequently) and saving on storage costs (by delivering just in time with small and...

Purpose - A program of shipment consolidation (SCL) is the purposeful intervention by management to regularly combine several small shipments so that a larger load may be dispatched on the same vehicle. SCL decisions traditionally have been based upon minimization of total logistics costs...