MANAGEMENT OUTSOURCING IN THE MARITIME TRANSPORT INDUSTRY

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the probability that shipping companies will outsource the management of vessels to ship management companies. A Mixed Logit regression is applied to a dataset of 39,925 vessels belonging to 4,049 different ship-owners (each operating a fleet of at least two vessels) to explain how the characteristics of the owners influence this decision. We also estimate random effects Probit and fixed effect Logit models to assess the role of the vessels' characteristics on outsourcing. Our main result is that the size of the firm in terms of the number of vessels and the number of different types of vessels influence significantly the likelihood of outsourcing.