# Page History

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title Key points
• Industry practices tend to rely on 'smoothed' market inputs that do not reflect the market price of risk or its variance over time
• Comparable transactions are hard to come by in the unlisted infrastructure sector.
• Listed infrastructure proxies are very biased and noisy and not representative of the unlisted infrastructure universe.
• Both IFRS guidance and industry practices focus solely on measuring the value of unlisted financial assets and do not address risk indirectly. However, neither approaches provide a general framework for the estimation of appropriate discount factors over time in unlisted and illiquid investments such as infrastructure equity and debt, leading to potentially significant biases in the measurement of fair value, as well as the risk taken by investors.

Industry practices, when it comes to the valuation of unlisted infrastructure investments, tend to follow IFRS guidance. For instance, the principles outlined in the International Private Equity and Venture Capital Valuation Guidelines (IPEV) include market- and income-based techniques and suggest using:

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Thus, a typical example of the DCF methodology applied to unlisted assets like unlisted infrastructure requires finding the unique discount rate  in order to compute

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NAV=\sum_{t=1}^\infty \frac{CF_t}{(1+r)^t}-P_0

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The discount rate

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body r
is typically computed as

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r=R_f + \beta \times ERP + \alpha

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While this formula complies with the accounting guidelines identified above, it also makes two very strong assumptions: 1/ that

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body \beta
can be known for the unlisted asset in question and 2/ that the market price of equity risk'' is a necessary and sufficient metric of investors' required price of risk for the investment under consideration.

This  This approach can have several important shortcomings:

1. Finding an adequate proxy of unlisted companies’ market can be difficult, especially if few actual listed proxies exist. In the case of unlisted infrastructure, recent research by EDHECinfra has shown that most standard measures of 'listed infrastructure' are very noisy and correlate highly with broad market stock indices .
2. Using moving averages
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body R_f
and
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body ERP
tends to “smooth” returns and produce “stale” valuations that do not reflect current valuation preferences in the reference market and prevent adequate measurement of risk (price variance).
3. The use of a single risk factor (so-called equity risk) to estimate the relevant discount rate implies that all relevant risks found in infrastructure investments are proxied by the stock market. In theory and in empirical tests, this is not a robust assumption.
4. The choice of market to estimate the implies a significant overlap with the relevant principal market for the unlisted assets so that the risk preferences captured by this aggregate public-market risk premia can be attributed to the potential buyers and sellers of the unlisted asset. However, while many heterogenous buyers and sellers are active in public equity markets, a smaller and more homogenous group of large institutional investors and managers buy and sell unlisted infrastructure companies. As a result, the price of equity risk observed in the US or UK broad equity market may not be considered representative of the risk preferences of institutional investors involved in infrastructure investment.
5. Additional premia added to the component of the discount rate are typically ad hoc and without much theoretical or empirical support. Moreover, discounts for lack of marketability are not not consistent with IFRS 13, since fair value is measured on the transaction date, presumably after any required marketing period, hence no discount is required to account for the time to execute a transaction. Likewise, the lack of frequent trading is a characteristic of unlisted infrastructure assets that market participants take into account and include in the price they are willing to pay at the date of measurement. Applying  Applying discounts for liquidity is ad hoc and contradicts the notion of fair value under IRFS 13, because it is an inherently subjective consideration when buying or selling a given financial asset at a given point in time and may not reflect the average liquidity premium in the relevant market.

Finally, both IFRS guidance and industry practices focus solely on measuring the value of unlisted financial assets and treat risk as an input, either implicit in observable transaction prices used to calibrate valuation models or explicit in the choice of risk premia applied in DCF methodologies.

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1. .