Waves in Ship Prices and Investment

Robin Greenwood and Samuel Hanson

No 19246, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the returns to owning dry bulk cargo ships. Ship earnings exhibit a high degree of mean reversion, driven by industry participants' competitive investment responses to shifts in demand. Ship prices are far too volatile given the mean reversion in earnings. We show that high current ship earnings are associated with high secondhand ship prices and heightened industry investment in fleet capacity, but forecast low future returns. We propose and estimate a behavioral model that can account for the evidence. In our model, firms over-extrapolate exogenous demand shocks and partially neglect the endogenous investment responses of their competitors. Formal estimation of the model confirms that both types of expectational errors are needed to account for our findings.

JEL-codes: E44 G02 G12 L9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: AP CF EFG
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Waves in Ship Prices and Investment* Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2015) 130 (1): 55-109. doi: 10.1093/qje/qju035

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