The determinants of credit spreads changes in global shipping bonds.

yesThis paper investigates whether bond, issuer, industry and macro-specific variables account for the observed variation of credit spreads’ changes of global shipping bond issues before and after the onset of the subprime financial crisis. Results show that conclusions as to the significant variables of spreads depend significantly on whether two-way clusteradjusted standard errors are utilized, thus rendering results in the extant literature ambigious. The main determinants of global cargo-carrying companies’ shipping bond spreads are found in this paper to be: the liquidity of the bond issue, the stock market’s volatility, the bond market’s cyclicality, freight earnings and the credit rating of the bond issue

A survey of shipping finance research: setting the future research agenda

Financing shipping related investment projects has always been a focal area of debate and research within the international maritime industry since access to funding can determine the competitiveness of a capital-intensive business as well as its success or failure under adverse market conditions. This paper provides, for the first time, a comprehensive and structured survey of all published research in the area of shipping finance and investment. The review spans approximately four decades (1979-2018) of empirical evidence, including 162 studies published in 48 scholarly journals, complemented with select books and book chapters. The study provides a bibliometric analysis and comprehensive synthesis of existing research offering an invaluable source of information for both the academic community and business practice, shaping the future research agenda in shipping finance and investment

Time Varying Risks Among Segments of the Tanker Freight Markets

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relative risks involved in owning and operating tanker vessels of different sizes in world spot and time-charter (TC) markets. Cointegrating Error Correction ARCH models are used to model spot and TC rates for each ship size and the associated time varying risks involved. The advantage of using this class of models for analysis is that the error correction term can capture the short-run dynamic behaviour of rates, while the estimation of time varying volatilities allows for the explicit comparison of risks at each point in time. Indeed, levels and patterns of freight risk are shown to vary over time. Broadly, comparison of these risks across markets point to TC rates having lower volatilities in comparison to the spot rates, and freight rates of larger vessels having higher volatilities compared to the freight volatilities of smaller vessels. Thus, for risk averse owners, wishing to reduce risks, results suggest operating tanker ships in TC rather than spot markets, and using smaller size vessels to diversify the higher risks involved in owning and operating larger size vessels. Maritime Economics & Logistics (2003) 5, 227–250. doi:10.1057/palgrave.mel.9100079

Default risk drivers in shipping bank loans

This paper proposes a credit scoring model for the empirical assessment of default risk drivers of shipping bank loans. A unique dataset, consisting of the credit portfolio of a ship-lending bank is used to estimate a logit model with two-way clustered adjusted standard errors, ensuring robust inferences. Industry specific variables, captured through current and expected conditions in the extremely volatile global shipping freight markets, the risk appetite of borrowers–the shipowners – expressed through the chartering policy they follow – and a pricing variable, are shown for the first time to be the important factors explaining default probabilities of bank loans

Seasonality patterns in tanker spot freight rate markets

The aim of this paper is to investigate the existence and nature of seasonality (deterministic or stochastic) in tanker freight markets and measure and compare it across sub-sectors and under different market conditions (expansionary and contractionary) for the period January 1978 to December 1996. The existence of stochastic seasonality is rejected for all freight series while results on deterministic seasonality indicate increases in rates in November and December and decreases in rates from January to April. Seasonality is found to be varying across markets depending on vessel size and market condition. Seasonality comparisons under different market conditions, an issue investigated for the first time in the econometrics literature using Markov Switching models, reveal that seasonal rate movements are more pronounced when the market is recovering compared to smaller changes when the market is falling. This is well in line with the low and high elasticity of supply expected in expansionary and contractionary periods of shipping markets. The results have implications for tactical shipping operations such as budget planning, timing of dry-docking, vessel speed adjustments and repositioning. As expected, the out-of-sample forecasting performance of these Markov Regime Switching models is lacking somewhat, a result which is thought to be a consequence of having to predict ‘states’ simultaneously with mean values

Constant vs. time-varying hedge ratios and hedging efficiency in the BIFFEX market

This paper estimates time-varying and constant hedge ratios, and investigates their performance in reducing freight rate risk in routes 1 and 1A of the Baltic Freight Index. Time-varying hedge ratios are generated by a bivariate error correction model with a GARCH error structure. We also introduce an augmented GARCH (GARCH-X) model where the error correction term enters in the specification of the conditional covariance matrix. This specification links the concept of disequilibrium (as proxied by the magnitude of the error correction term) with that of uncertainty (as reflected in the time varying second moments of spot and futures prices). In- and out-of-sample tests reveal that the GARCH-X specification provides greater risk reduction than a simple GARCH and a constant hedge ratio. However, it fails to eliminate the riskiness of the spot position to the extent evidenced in other markets in the literature. This is thought to be the result of the heterogeneous composition of the underlying index. It seems that restructuring the composition of the Baltic Freight Index (BFI) so as to reflect homogeneous shipping routes may increase the hedging effectiveness of the futures contract. This by itself indicates that the imminent introduction of the Baltic Panamax Index (BPI) as the underlying asset of the Baltic International Financial Futures Exchange (BIFFEX) contract is likely to have a beneficial impact on the market.