Featured Session on Shipping Finance

• Professor Amir H. Alizadeh will investigate the effect of heterogeneous investor behaviour on tanker ship prices. By developing a heterogeneous agent model, it can be noticed that tanker price dynamics can be partly explained by differences in investment behaviour and strategies of market participants. In addition, it seems that demand from investors following market fundamentals and use of contrarian strategies has a stabilising effect on tanker prices, whereas demand from investors following market momentum and trend is likely to destabilise the tanker prices.
  
  
• Professors Roar Adland and Steen Koekebakker estimate the marginal cost and markup as two separate autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) processes, and discuss the economic implications for their findings. By using spot rate data from liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and very large crude carrier (VLCC) freight markets, their main statistical findings are as follows. The marginal cost process seems to be nonstationary. This is not very surprising, as it is closely related to crude oil. The markup is found to be stationary, but has strong persistence. The qualitative features of their decomposition seem robust across market segments, indicating that this analysis applies to shipping markets in general.