Infrastructure benchmark pioneers create research chair to gauge how ESG factors are affecting infrastructure investments EDHECinfra, the same team that created an unlisted infrastructure indexing platform, launches its new three-year research project today. With the support of Natixis, the project’s aim is to create usable, comparable documented measures of the impact and risk profile of social and environmental factors on infrastructure investments. ESG – growing in importance, growing in impact ESG – environmental, social and governance – refers to the central factors in measuring the sustainability and ethical impact of an investment in a company or business. Despite its relevance to today’s financial world, few holistic and systematic measures exist to help investors to track ESG outcomes and related risks. Because these shortfalls act as a deterrent to investment, EDHECinfra is determined to tackle them. “Infrastructure investments have value because they are useful over long periods of time,” says Frederic Blanc-Brude, director of EDHECinfra. “Social and environmental factors significantly impact this long-term value, but today we do not know how or on what scale.” “We want to find out what the impact of better-designed, more resilient infrastructure can be for the economy and for investors, focusing on the first-order problems, like climate risk and social acceptability, over the life of these investments,” explains Anne-Christine Champion, Global Head of Real Assets at Natixis. “Together, we can build a new area of applied knowledge,” adds Blanc-Brude. “We will be putting together existing datasets …

EDHECinfra partner RICS is launching the 2nd edition of its global consultation on International Construction Measurement Standards (ICMS).

We carried out the largest survey of infrastructure investors ever made. Here’s what we found: The largest survey of infrastructure investors ever undertaken shows that most investors cannot benchmark the risks they find themselves exposed to when investing in unlisted infrastructure. EDHECinfra releases a new survey sponsored by the Global Infrastructure Hub (GIH, a G20 Initiative). More than 300 respondents took part in the survey. They included representatives of 130 asset owners accounting for  more than 10% of global AUM or $10 trillion. This marks largest survey ever undertaken of asset owners and managers active in the infrastructure space and represents the views of large sophisticated investors. Some of the main findings include: Investors mostly use absolute return benchmarks (based on the risk-free or inflation rate), but less than 10% think they are good enough. Major concerns include: they are not representative, do not measure risk and do not allow asset-liability management. Currently, absolute return infrastructure equity benchmarks are not ambitious and not hard to beat. Most investors use a spread over real or nominal rate of 400-500bp. In a low rate environment, this falls short of annualised stock market returns. When investors use relative benchmarks, they use ‘fake benchmarks.’ Preferred relative benchmarks often include listed infrastructure indices, which have been shown to display 100% correlation with broad equity indices by academic research. Otherwise, investors use ‘industry peers’ as a relative benchmark, despite the well-known issues encountered with valuation and …

A new paper drawn from the Natixis/EDHECinfra research chair sheds new light on the drivers of returns in private infrastructure debt. Infrastructure credit spreads remain twice as high today as in 2008, but this new research shows that only 30bps of this increase cannot be explained by changes in systematic risk factor prices.

New EDHECinfra research finds there is no financial penalty or gain (based on Return on Assets) for infrastructure firms to implement ESG management and reporting.A new paper drawn from the EDHECinfra/LTIIA Research Chair shows that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores are not negatively or positively correlated with the financial performance of unlisted infrastructure firms.

New EDHECinfra research documents the factors behind the evolution of unlisted infrastructure prices over past 15 years. Common risk factors found in numerous asset classes explain the evolution of unlisted infrastructure secondary market prices. That’s the finding of a new paper drawn from the EDHECinfra /LTIIA Research Chair. Interestingly, the paper also shows that that, after a long period of prices increases, “peak infra” may already be behind us. Unlisted infrastructure prices have increased considerably over the past decade. Was it a bubble or a normal phenomenon? In a new ground-breaking paper, EDHECinfra shows that systematic risk factors can largely explain the evolution of average prices but also that valuations have shifted to a higher level. No, it’s not a bubble Author and Director of EDHECinfra Frederic Blanc-Brude said: “The worries about a bubble were driven by the constant increase in prices since 2008. In fact, the process of price discovery happened in slow motion. Infrastructure businesses are expected to deliver steady and predictable cash flows and, to the extent that this is the case, they should be expensive. In a very illiquid market, it took 10 years for investors’ views on fair value to express themselves.” In a  a very illiquid market where assets seldom trade, such as infrastructure, just looking at average reported prices can give insufficient and biased data. The paper uses actual transaction prices and advanced statistical techniques to estimate unbiased factor effects. It then applies …

Singapore, 10 April 2018 – A case study of 10 Spanish toll road projects shows that ill-designed procurement can lead to pro-cyclical infrastructure investment risk and significant losses for private investors. EDHEC Infrastructure Institute – an academic research organisation building performance benchmarks for investors in private infrastructure – shed new light on the risks encountered in infrastructure project investment with new research examining the failed Spanish toll roads that the government just took over and intends to retender to private investors later this year. The paper – Tome La Siguiente Salida (Take the Next Exit) – A Case Study of Road Investments Gone Wrong, Spain, 1998-2018 – is based on detailed financial data on each of the concession companies as well as in-depth interviews with individuals representing the public and private sector directly involved in the collapsed projects. Despite the discipline of project financing and the presence of a blanket government guarantee in case of bankruptcy, equity investors were wiped out and their lenders booked losses of 90 cents on the dollar. How and why did these projects fail? The detailed analysis of the events that led to the bankruptcy of all but one of the nine toll road concessions shows how case studies can be a valuable tool for understanding risk for investors. Governments can procure privately financed infrastructure projects in ways that magnify moral hazard and create systematic risk for investors. In the case of the Spanish toll …

Singapore, 30 January 2018 – Based on preferences expressed by major institutions in a new survey, EDHECinfra is releasing a taxonomy of global indices and sub-indices to structure the infrastructure asset class.

Singapore – 9 October 2017: In open letters to the chairman of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States, EDHEC has called on regulators to take measures against the risks of investment in so-called `listed infrastructure’.