Transportation Bottlenecks and Aggregate Shocks

Giulia Brancaccio, Myrto Kalouptsidi, Theodore Papageorgiou and Yixin Zhou

No 22001, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Do transportation disruptions affect aggregate outcomes? We develop a tractable model of the transportation sector to study its impact on prices and international trade. By casting maritime transportation as a queueing network, the model identifies where the transportation bottlenecks lie and delivers a simple and easy-to-compute measure of transportation capacity over time. We calibrate the model using shipping and trade data and use it to evaluate the resilience of the shipping sector during the last 20 years. During the Great Supply Chain Disruption, port bottlenecks raised commodity prices and caused shortages, but a contemporaneous contraction in commodity supply reduced shipping demand and thereby dampened these effects. By contrast, insufficient shipping capacity was a key driver of price increases during the 2000s Commodity Supercycle.

JEL-codes: E F (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP22001 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:22001

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP22001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().