Prof. Roman Kräussl presented his research on “Infrastructure as an Investable Asset” at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s “Economics of Infrastructure” conference in Massachusetts, USA.
The conference was organised by researchers from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and brought together academics from Canada, the UK and the US as well as analysts from US think tanks and government agencies.
The research presented by Prof. Kräussl, Assistant Professor Aleksandar Andonov (Erasmus University Rotterdam), and Prof. Joshua D. Rauh (Stanford University, Hoover Institution) investigates the characteristics of infrastructure as an asset class with a special focus on the perspective of institutional investors who gain exposure to infrastructure assets, primarily as limited partners in infrastructure fund vehicles.
By analysing a unique data set of more than 3,300 infrastructure projects, the research team was able to measure and study differences in financial performance across different types of institutional investors. They find that pension funds perform worse than other institutional investors, indicating that infrastructure as an asset class has so far failed for US public pension funds.
Prof. Kräussl is a specialist in alternative assets and has worked together with Prof. Rauh as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, over the last year and a half.