White Papers

White Paper July 2026

Private Assets, Listed Benchmarks: Why Canada's Pension Funds Are Being Judged by the Wrong Yardstick

Canada's largest pension plans all underperformed their benchmarks in the year to March 2026 — CPP Investments by 5.4 percentage points. The cause isn't poor private equity execution: it's a benchmarking convention, with eight of the country's largest plans measuring the same asset class against eight different, mostly listed, standards. Using privateMetrics® and the private2000® index, this paper shows private equity returned a market-wide 6.1% in calendar 2025 — measured against a genuine private-market benchmark, the plans' results look unremarkable rather than alarming — and argues for asset-class benchmarks that capture the market a fund is actually invested in.

Download PDF

White Paper July 2026

Bridge to Alpha: Repricing Value Creation Against a Private-Market Benchmark

The standard buyout value bridge is an accounting identity, not a benchmark — it credits growth, margin expansion, and debt repayment to the manager while staying silent on the market that produced much of the return. Using privateMetrics® and the Direct Alpha Method, this paper reprices deal- and fund-level value creation against a matched private-market benchmark: 18.1% of Clayton Dubilier & Rice Fund IX's 23.0% IRR turns out to be market return, and two vintages from the same house — Francisco Partners IV and Francisco Agility — swing from −1.7% to +36.8% Direct Alpha once the market is priced out.

Download PDF

White Paper June 2026

Total Portfolio Approach to Private Assets — Part IV: Factor Allocations

The final piece in a four-part series, this paper shows that allocation weights are not the same as factor exposures. Using privateMetrics® and infraMetrics® alongside listed asset indices, a growth-oriented portfolio targeting 65/25/20 exposure to the equity, interest-rate, and credit factors sees its Sharpe ratio rise from 0.55 to 0.67 once private assets are incorporated — because private asset classes carry meaningful uncorrelated residuals against their listed proxies, and infrastructure equities' dual exposure to both the equity and interest-rate factors makes that exposure difficult to replicate with listed assets alone.

Download PDF

Part IV of IV

White Paper June 2026

Total Portfolio Approach to Private Assets — Part III: Private Assets Risk Factors Exposure

The third in a four-part series, this paper maps the factor exposures of private assets to total-portfolio desired exposures. Using privateMetrics® and infraMetrics® alongside listed asset indices, it shows that private equity's beta to the listed equity factor is time-varying — running above 1 through the low-rate 2014–2021 period and falling well below 1 since 2022 — so static allocation weights alone can leave portfolios materially over- or under-exposed to growth risk without active monitoring and adjustment via listed assets.

Download PDF

Part III of IV

White Paper June 2026

Total Portfolio Approach to Private Assets — Part II: The Reference Portfolio as a Governance Mechanism

Building on Part I, this paper shows how a reference portfolio of equities and bonds serves as a governance mechanism for private asset allocations. Using privateMetrics® and infraMetrics® index data, institutional investors can translate private holdings into consistent risk budgets and clearly attribute active versus passive performance contributions.

Download PDF

Part II of IV

White Paper June 2026

Total Portfolio Approach to Private Assets — Part I: Measuring Exposures with Private Markets Data

The first in a four-part series, this paper introduces tools for measuring private asset factor exposures within multi-asset portfolios. Using the privateMetrics® and infraMetrics® indices, investors can map private equity and infrastructure allocations onto systematic risk factors, enabling evidence-based comparisons against public market hurdles and more dynamic allocation decisions.

Download PDF

Part I of IV

White Paper June 2026

Benchmarking Private Market Performance: Finding Alpha in Private Market Funds

Using cash-flow data from private equity buyout and infrastructure funds, this paper compares peer-group methods, public market equivalents, and the privateMetrics® index approach. Most private funds generate near-zero net alpha after fees, while persistent outperformance among select managers challenges conventional selection approaches and the benchmarks used to evaluate them.

Download PDF

White Paper May 2026

PRIIPs and Private Asset Risk

Why default risk scores misclassify private asset funds — and how ESMA-registered, monthly index data produces accurate PRIIPs risk scores of 2–5 instead of 6 or 7. Using ten years of monthly data from privateMetrics® and infraMetrics®, this paper demonstrates that private equity indices produce MRM scores of 4 to 5, infrastructure equity 3 to 4, and infrastructure debt as low as 2 — a far more accurate reflection of actual risk than the regulatory default score of 6 or 7 assigned in the absence of an appropriate benchmark.

Download PDF

White Paper December 2025

The Performance of Infrastructure Debt

Private infrastructure debt is more than a niche extension of corporate or real-estate credit. Using infraMetrics® data across a full 2014–2025 market cycle, this paper shows that it differs materially in credit stability, sector composition, and performance behaviour — with lower default probabilities, higher recovery rates, and smaller, shorter-lived drawdowns during market stress than comparable corporate-bond and real-estate credit benchmarks — and why purpose-built benchmarks, not listed proxies, are required to measure and manage it.

Download PDF

Peer-Reviewed October 2025

Dynamic Modeling of Transaction Prices in Private Equity Markets

Published in The Journal of Investing, this paper by Srinivasan Selvam and Timothy Whittaker (EDHEC Infra & Private Assets Research Institute) presents the transaction-based factor model underlying privateMetrics® valuations. Calibrated dynamically on a global dataset of private company transactions, it shows that size and country risk depress valuations while profitability, leverage, and public market valuation lift them — replacing subjective, smoothed appraisals with real-time, data-driven prices consistent with fair-value accounting standards.

Download PDF

Peer-Reviewed Fall 2024

Achieving Diversification in Unlisted Infrastructure Investment: A Smart Infra Portfolio Construction

Published in The Journal of Alternative Investments, this paper by Frederic Blanc-Brude, Abhishek Gupta, and Moataz Farid (EDHEC Infrastructure Institute) shows that adding more assets, sectors, and geographies is an inefficient way to diversify an unlisted infrastructure portfolio. Using the intrinsic risk characteristics of infrastructure investments rather than asset count, the "Smart Infra" approach builds highly diversified portfolios with fewer holdings, and demonstrates the strategic asset allocation benefits of including infrastructure in a multi-asset portfolio.

Download PDF

White Paper November 2022

Building Portfolios with Infrastructure: Performance, Cash Flows & Portfolio Allocation

Published by PGIM Institutional Advisory & Solutions in collaboration with EDHECinfra, this paper by Junying Shen (PGIM IAS) and Frédéric Blanc-Brude (EDHECinfra) uses asset- and fund-level data to compare the performance and cash-flow characteristics of unlisted infrastructure against public and other private assets. It models infrastructure equity income returns and cash flows by age and sector, and — incorporating the results into PGIM's OASIS asset-allocation framework — shows how infrastructure's relatively large, stable income return can improve a multi-asset portfolio's diversification and liquidity profile.

Download PDF

White Paper September 2022

Inflation and Rising Rates: An Opportunity for Infrastructure Investors?

Published by Ares Management in collaboration with EDHECinfra, this paper shows that private infrastructure held up through the inflation shock of H1 2022 — the EDHECinfra300 index fell just 5.2%, against a 20.6% decline for the S&P 500 and 10.8% for US government debt. Using the TICCS® business-model classification (contracted, merchant, regulated), it shows how the speed at which infrastructure assets can pass inflation through to revenues varies by business model, and argues that rising rates widen the opportunity for private infrastructure capital as governments turn to private funding for new and existing projects.

Download PDF