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TRANSPORTATION SCIENCE ABSTRACTS"Ship Funds as a New Asset Class: An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Spot and Forward Prices in Freight Markets"
WOLFGANG BESSLER, University of Giessen Over the last decade, various new asset classes have emerged as alternatives to the more traditional investments. Although they appear attractive at a first glance, there exists hardly any historical performance track record, and experience with the return generating variables is limited. For ship funds and the valuation of shipping projects, the prevailing freight rates are important price-determining factors. Therefore, knowledge about the time series properties of spot and forward freight rates is essential for a better understanding of the return generating process of ship funds. There are, however, several peculiarities. Because shipping is a nonstorable service, forward prices need not to be linked to spot prices by any direct arbitrage relationship. We test the implications of this notion by using data for Panamax size bulk carriers and find that even in informationally efficient markets spot freight rates are highly autocorrelated. In addition, spot and forward freight rates are cointegrated, and the equilibrium is established by spot rates converging to forward rates. An extension of the standard vector error correction model reveals time variation in the adjustment speed. Overall, our empirical findings suggest that the time series properties of freight rates need to be well understood before investing in ship funds. Another important aspect is whether ship funds should hedge their freight rate exposure in the forward market to reduce the return volatility or whether investors can achieve the same outcome by holding ship funds in a portfolio context. "Core: A Heuristic to Solve Vehicle Routing Problem with Mixed Delivery and Pickup"
S. P. ANBUUDAYASANKAR, Amrita University Conventionally, the vehicle routing problem is considered as a pure delivery or a pickup variant. In many real-life circumstances, the vehicle is frequently used for a mixed combination of delivery and pickup. This paper deals with the vehicle routing problem variant with mixed delivery and pickup. A two-phase heuristic is developed to address this variant. A constructive heuristic based on modified K-means clustering methodology is proposed to develop an initial feasible solution in the first stage. Then, the adapted Or-opt mechanism is employed as the improvement heuristic for improving the initial feasible solution. Random test instances generated based on real data are evaluated between the lower bound obtained using CPLEX for the mathematical programming model developed by Wade and Salhi (2002) and the solution of the two-stage heuristic. "Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility: The Impact of Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Industrializing Berlin"
GABRIEL M. AHLFELDT, University of Hamburg - Faculty of Economics and Business Administration As the first to use an archival data set on historical land values of Berlin, Germany, from 1890 to 1936, we exploit exogenous variation in transport technology in order to test the validity of the monocentric city model. Endogenously determining the CBD, we conduct cross-section and time difference analysis and model the land gradient in terms of straight-line distance and travel times. A counterfactual scenario indicates that a large proportion of urban decentralization is attributable to improvements in transport infrastructure. Controlling for spatial dependency, results suggest that the monocentric model fitted the city structure until the mid 20th century. "Two Aspects of Alien Species Management in a Seaport: Ship Classification and Ship Inspection Costs"
AMITRAJEET A. BATABYAL, Rochester Institute of Technology - Department of Economics The many aspects of alien species management normally all involve decision making over time and under uncertainty. Therefore, in this note, we focus on an arbitrary seaport in a country called Home and we conduct a dynamic and stochastic analysis of two questions that have received insufficient attention in the extant literature on alien species management. First, we provide a particular way of classifying ships that enter the Home seaport from K possible countries in the time interval [0,t]. Second, we characterize the total cost of inspecting the ships that arrive in the Home seaport during the same time interval [0,t]. | |||||||||
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Solicitation of Abstracts
This abstracting journal distributes working and accepted papers addressing transportation systems questions using Operations Research techniques. The journal welcomes research with a focus on how new devices, technologies, or market mechanisms might be integrated effectively into complex transportation systems in its design, planning, operations and management phases to achieve certain performance objectives. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, crew and vehicle scheduling, design of transportation networks and services, e-commerce and auctions for transportation services, integration of advanced communications or tracking systems, methods for system control and management, pricing and costing of transportation services, and system equilibrium modeling.
Distribution ServicesIf your Institution is interested in learning more about increasing readership for its research by becoming a Partner in Publishing or starting a Research Paper Series, please email: PIP@SSRN.com. Distributed by:DirectorsOPER SUBJECT MATTER EJOURNALS MICHAEL C. JENSEN Please contact us at the above addresses with your comments, questions or suggestions for OPER-Sub.
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