Marine container terminals are essential components of global supply chains and terminal operators face many challenges to remain efficient and competitive (Steenken et al., 2005). Game theory provides promising avenues to advance our understanding and modeling of container terminal planning and operations (and freight and maritime transportation in general). It allows us to develop mathematical-empirical relations and models that describe and emulate the behavior of the various stakeholders utilizing market-based mechanisms. In this workshop we first provide a brief overview of maritime transportation, mathematical programming, and game theory basics (non- and cooperative games). We then present two applications of game theory to marine container terminals operations and planning to address uncertainty (Golias et. al., 2014), capacity utilization optimization (Pujats et al., 2020, 2021; Dulebenets et al., 2018) and resource allocation (Giampouranis et al., 2022). At the end of the workshop participants will develop a conceptual model to depict the interactions between terminals, liner shipping companies, and port authorities.

The explosion in ESG research has led to a strong reliance on ESG rating providers. We document widespread changes to the historical ratings of a key rating provider, Refinitiv ESG (formerly ASSET4). Depending on whether the original or rewritten data are used, ESG-based classifications of firms into ESG quantiles and tests that relate ESG scores to returns change. While there is a positive link between ESG scores and firms’ stock market performance in the rewritten data, we fail to observe such a relationship in the initial data. The ESG data rewriting is an ongoing rather than a one-off phenomenon.

Theory suggests that relatively inefficient firms should have lower and more uncertain future cash flows, which should lead to lower current equity values and future higher equity returns. However, the literature provides contradictory evidence about the relationship between operational efficiency and future stock performance. We provide evidence that investors are not fully aware of firms’ operational inefficiencies, and are surprised when future negative earnings surprises continue resulting in a significant negative drift in returns for these firms. Furthermore, we provide evidence that analysts do not properly incorporate information about operational inefficiency into their earnings forecasts and target prices, and seem not to care about the issue during conference calls.

In the light of finite oil reserves, Persian Gulf oil-exporting economies have recently undertaken major investments in their domestic travel and tourism industries. Building on the Bayesian SVAR model of the global oil market in Baumeister and Hamilton (2019), we investigate the conditional comovement of airline stock returns with real oil prices in response to structural oil supply and demand shocks. We find that investing in the Datastream World Airline Index offers a hedging benefit conditional on oil supply, consumption demand, and inventory demand shocks, whereas there is no evidence of systematic positive or negative comovement following shocks to world economic activity and airline stock returns.

In 2013, the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) entered Phase III. Τhe majority of emission permits in Phase III are auctioned instead of being allocated for free as in Phases I and II. Using a difference-in-differences method, we show that this change has led to an increase in the financial distress risk of the EU-ETS-regulated firms when compared to unregulated firms, suggesting that the EU-ETS imposes a significant financial burden for regulated firms. This result is robust to an array of validation tests, alleviating concerns that it is driven by unobserved factors. In additional analyses, we show that the increase in distress risk of regulated firms during Phase III can be explained by two main mechanisms, (i) an additional cash outflow to purchase pollution permits and (ii) a low average environmental score that possibly (via high sustainability risk) lowers investors expectations regarding firms’ performance.

Environmental and social (ES) funds in non-ES families must balance incorporating the stakeholder’s interests they advertise and maximizing shareholder value favored by their families. We find that these funds support ES proposals that are far from the majority threshold, while opposing them when their vote is more likely to be pivotal, consistent with greenwashing. This strategic voting is not exhibited in governance proposals, by ES funds in ES families or by non-ES funds in non-ES families, reinforcing the notion of strategic voting to accommodate family preferences while appearing to meet the fiduciaries responsibilities of the funds.

As machines replace humans in financial markets, how is informational efficiency impacted? We shed light on this issue by exploiting a unique data-set that allows us to identify when machines access important company information (8-K filings) versus when humans access the same information. We find that increased information access by cloud computing services significantly improves informational efficiency and reduces the price drift following information events. We address identification through exogenous power and cloud outages, a quasi-natural experiment, and instrumental variables. We show that machines are better able to handle linguistically complex filings, less susceptible to bias from negative sentiment and less constrained in attention/processing capacity than humans.

We document a negative relation between abnormal temperature and quality of life in the U.S. since 1990. Cross-state and (within state-year) county-level comparisons both indicate that the temperature-quality of life relation is more positive in states adopting more stringent environmental policies prior to our sample period. Additional tests indicate no significant pre-adoption differences in the temperature-income sensitivity of adopters and non-adopters. Together, our findings suggest that U.S. quality of life is likely to deteriorate on average if rising temperature projections manifest and that enhancing current environmental policies should be added to the list of potential avenues of adaption.