Insights

CAPM may be ‘one of the founding frameworks of modern finance’, but for determining the net asset value of unlisted infrastructure it is terribly inadequate. Frédéric Blanc-Brude, the director of the EDHEC Infrastructure Institute explains why and offers an alternative. Originally published in Infrastructure Investor. When reporting the NAV of unlisted assets like infrastructure using discounted cashflows, best practice consists

This paper proposes a factor model based solution that, when calibrated with transaction data and novel risk factors, can transform sparse, noisy, and biased transaction data into meaningful information that aids asset allocation, benchmarking, and monitoring of private investments.

In this paper, we ask what investors in Thames Water – and its holding company Kemble Water – would have learned about the level of risk of their investment and its likely market value had they compared its characteristics to market and peer group data.

This paper describes the novel method that we have developed to measure climate risks. While we here apply this method to infrastructure assets, it paves the way to using similar approaches to enlarge the scope of its application.

Using asset- and fund-level data, we highlight important differences between infrastructure assets and funds, and compare their historical performance and cash flow characteristics with both public and other private investments. An infrastructure asset’s age, sector, business risk and corporate structure all influence the asset’s risk-return profile. We examine the sensitivity of infrastructure asset and fund performance to public markets by regressing infrastructure returns (at the aggregate, sector and age group level) on public asset market returns. We then develop a method to estimate infrastructure equity assets’ income returns and cash flows depending on their age and sector. With measures defined that capture both idiosyncratic and time-series income return volatility, we highlight that a CIO cannot ignore the high idiosyncratic risk of infrastructure assets when evaluating their future performance and cash flow risk. To reduce a portfolio’s idiosyncratic income return risk, we find that adding assets from the same sector may be as efficacious as adding the same number of assets from different sectors. We show how many assets are needed before idiosyncratic income return risk starts to level off.

In this paper, we examine the impact on realised performance of the permanent shift in investor preferences for low carbon energy investments, and how it relates to the expected returns of green power investments.