Understanding the dynamics of shipping freight rates and volatility transmission mechanism is important for market players, economists, and policy makers of maritime transport. Recently, “Quantitative modelling of shipping freight rates: developments in the past 20 years” was published in the journal of MARITIME POLICY & MANAGEMENT，which systematically reviews the relevant literature on shipping freight rate published between 2000 and 2019. The review provides empirical insights including the major influencing factors of shipping freight rates and differences among the shipping sectors, and discusses the dominant methods and their applicability, strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities for new methods. The collaboration network analysis shows that more knowledge sharing and cross-discipline collaboration efforts can create potential for more inspiredinsights with advanced methods. It states that over 36% of all papers are contributed by six networks, one of which is Feier Chen's team from SJTU. 

Co-authorship network (from the MPM)

The research of Feier's Chen team is mainly based on multi-scale and complex networks theory. It explores the fluctuation transmission mechanism among multiple markets in the shipping freight rates, industrial chains of trading, shipping and shipbuilding both from the two dimensions of time and space structure, which contributes to the field of multi-scale dynamic networks structure of complex systems.

Some of the research progress of the team has attracted the attention of peers, such as the long memory and scale behavior of dry bulk freight rates with structural breaks; the asymmetric volatility of freight rate before and after the structural breaks; the multifractal cross-correlations between crude oil and tanker freight rate; the hub-and-spoke network of container routes and the global supply chain disorder under the epidemic situation.

Besides, Feier Chen was awarded by the Transportation Research Part E for the outstanding contribution in reviewing.

From: the research team of ports and shipping, NAOCE