Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

The introduction of containerization triggered complementary technological and organizational changes that revolutionized global freight transport. Despite numerous claims about the importance of containerization in stimulating international trade, econometric estimates on the effects of...

We quantify the effect of container technology on transport costs and trade by estimating the modal choice between containerization and breakbulk shipping using micro-level trade data. The model is motivated by novel facts that relate container usage to shipment, destination and firm...

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the international transportation industry, causing container freight rates to reach record highs from late 2020 and into 2021. I evaluate the dynamic effects of the observed increases in container freight rates all around the world on the domestic inflation, real...

Global container ship movements may reliably predict global trade flows. Aggregating both movements at sea and port call events produces a wealth of explanatory variables. The machine learning algorithm partial least squares can map these explanatory time series to unilateral imports and...