Discover the latest EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Insights (P&I Supplement, August 2025)

The Valuation of Infrastructure Assets - Research for Institutional Money Management

EIPA - EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute is pleased to share the latest edition of the "Research supplement" edited in cooperation with Pensions & Investments.

This supplement highlights shortcomings in the valuation of infrastructure assets and suggests improvements, presents an innovative model based on real transaction data for private company valuation, explores underlying risk factors in private equity, and assesses the impact of fund scale on performance.:

• [online] P&I Supplement - EIPA, Research for Institutional Money Management (August 2025)

• [pdf] Download the pdf version of this supplement

An editorial and 4 papers

Introduction to this supplement

By Timothy Whittaker - EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute Director

This special private assets investment edition of the EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute supplement to P&I aims to share with institutional investors the latest findings from EIPA research team as they focus a rigorous, academic lens on some of the most urgent and complex challenges shaping their investment landscape today...

Fair Value or Fair Guess? Inside the Engines of Infrastructure Valuation

By Timothy Whittaker - EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute Director

The valuation of unlisted assets is foundational for critical financial decisions, including capital allocation, risk management, and regulatory reporting. Despite principles-based guidance from frameworks like IFRS 13, ASC 820, and the IPEV Guidelines, day-to-day valuation practices remain opaque and highly discretionary. This article presents the first large-scale empirical study of these practices, based on a global survey of 79 institutional investors and service providers...

The Valuation of Private Companies: Asset Valuation and the Dynamics of Private Markets

By Srinivasan Selvam - EIPA Senior Researcher, and Timothy Whittaker - EIPA Director

Investors face significant challenges when valuing private companies due to a lack of reliable valuation histories, making it difficult to construct accurate and representative private market indexes. Existing benchmarks often rely on appraised valuations, which are susceptible to biases such as smoothing, staleness, and poor representativeness, failing to reflect the full universe of private companies or current market information...

Market Risk in Private Equities – The Prominent Role of Systematic Risk Factors

By Frédéric Blanc-Brude - Scientific Infra & Private Assets Director, Evan Clark - EIPA Senior Private Market Analyst and Srinivasan Selvam - EIPA Senior Researcher

This article explores the role of systematic risk factors in explaining the pricing of private equities. The study analyses firm level operating performance volatility across a large asset level database and evaluates this volatility against key risk factors and market segments. The authors then evaluate extreme risk by reviewing insolvency risk across the same risk factors and market segments. Finally, the paper evaluates a large database of completed private equities transactions...

Does Size Matter? A Closer Look at Alpha across Fund Size

By Evan Clark - EIPA Senior Private Market Analyst

The author analyzed the performance of 586 buyout funds in the Americas, primarily U.S. focused, spanning vintages from 2013 to 2023. Using privateMetrics® indexes and the Excel plug-in tool, the author calculated alpha performance across the fund universe. By segmenting funds into size buckets, he observes that smaller and lower mid-market funds achieved higher median IRRs and alpha. In the smallest bucket (<USD500 million fund size), median alpha observed was +5.6%...

The EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute team would like to extend warm thanks to Pensions & Investments for their collaboration on the supplement.