Hydrological Shocks and Fuel-Supply Resilience
Combines river gauges, AIS tanker data, and fuel prices to measure waterway-shock pass-through and supply-chain resilience.
This project studies whether disruptions to German inland waterways are transmitted to retail fuel prices or absorbed by supply-chain buffers. Together with Konstantin Kuck, I combine high-frequency retail fuel prices with river-gauge data, vessel-level AIS tanker movements, road-count data, and pipeline and supply-node geography.
The empirical design separates two objects that are often conflated: directly observed logistics disruption and downstream retail-price incidence. Official low-water navigation constraints clearly reduce tanker movements at affected gauges. Retail-price gradients are positive in some more exposed markets, especially for diesel and E5, but the estimates are modest and event-study diagnostics do not support a simple robust price-increase story.
The paper therefore emphasizes a resilience margin. Inland-waterway shocks can disrupt logistics while inventories, terminals, pipelines, and substitute modes dampen pass-through to consumers.
Current manuscript: non-peer-reviewed working paper.