IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/35812.html

Transportation Bottlenecks and Aggregate Shocks

Author

Listed:
  • Giulia Brancaccio
  • Myrto Kalouptsidi
  • Theodore Papageorgiou
  • Yixin Zhou

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Giulia Brancaccio & Myrto Kalouptsidi & Theodore Papageorgiou & Yixin Zhou, 2026. "Transportation Bottlenecks and Aggregate Shocks," NBER Working Papers 35812, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35812
    Note: EFG IO ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35812.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General
    • F0 - International Economics - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35812. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.