Term Risk Premia in Shipping Markets: Reconciling the Evidence

Past research into the term structure of freight rates has generally proved unsuccessful in its attempts to establish the expectations hypothesis as applicable to shipping markets. Recent work has provided a possible explanation for such failures by identifying time-varying term risk premia in shipping markets. However, one interesting additional result of this work was to identify contradictory attitudes to term risk between shipping and financial markets. This paper reconsiders the theoretical background for such work and, instead of relying on contradictory attitudes to term risk, reconciles the results by developing an alternative approach to the conventional methodology on term structure. © 2007 LSE and the University of Bath