Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
This paper studies how the interactions between ships and exporters in the global shipping markets influence commodity flows and prices. We develop a multi-market search and matching model in which ships and exporters optimise their behaviours in response to market-specific and idiosyncratic shocks: unloaded ships can search for jobs in their market of last contract or ballast to some other market. Market-specific trade shocks induce net movements of ships out of markets hit by unfavourable shocks, while idiosyncratic taste shocks ensure gross flows between markets through ballasting are always positive, a prediction consistent with the data. Using detailed AIS data, we construct a unique shipping dataset which tracks tankers’ movements, loading status, and employment history. Leveraging it, we structurally estimate our model to study the market-switching behaviours of ships in the context of recent global trade disruption, and to recover a time-path of trade shocks and corresponding commodity flows and prices.
