You Write Infrastructure, You Read Stefano Gatti

THE SCHOLAR WILL INAUGURATE HIS ANTIN IP'S ASSOCIATE PROFESSORSHIP IN INFRASTRUCTURE FINANCE ON FEBRUARY 12TH

Stefano Gatti is Professor of Practice of Finance at Bocconi University, a title that, alongside academic merit, recognizes the scholar's closeness to the world of practice - in his case, the world of finance for large infrastructure. On Monday, February 12, he will hold the Lectio Inauguralis of his Antin Infrastructure Partners' Associate Professorship in Infrastructure Finance.
 
If a global infrastructure gap is widely recognized, because of an infrastructure need of 57 trillion dollars from now to 2030, the sector suffers also an academic gap, due to the lack of a consolidated body of knowledge and the scarcity of articles published by major scholarly journals.
 
“The gap was much wider in the mid-1990s, when I started to tackle the topic", recalls Gatti. “At that time there was still not a great deal of interest on the part of financial intermediaries and it was the developers themselves who wanted to understand how to finance major projects”. These were the years when the World Bank, through its International Finance Corporation, increased its attention to infrastructure in developing countries. “The real turning point dates back to the end of the 2000s, after the financial crisis”, Gatti continues. “With falling interest rates and declining yields, a search for new asset classes was unleashed to ensure reasonable returns with not-unreasonable risks, and thus large private equity and private debt funds entered the infrastructure world. Therefore, I continued to study project financing for infrastructure, but the characteristics of these techniques, now needed to finance what governments are no longer able to finance, have changed markedly with the entry of large financial operators".
 
On the topic Gatti has developed a highly successful Massive open online course on the Coursera platform (Financing and Investing in Infrastructure) and is the author of the industry reference handbook, Project Finance in Theory and Practiceice, published by Elsevier Academic Press. He has published articles in the European Journal of Operational Research, Health Policy, Financial Management, European Financial Management and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, as well as an influential work in OECD Working Papers on Finance series. He has also been advisor to leading development banks and financial organisations, such as the Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, OECD and the Financial Stability Board.
 
In addition to infrastructure research, Gatti follows at least two other research strands. The first is M&As, with the construction of a model that aims to determine the level of the acquisition premium at the same time as and in relation to the payment instruments. “In order to do this”, says Gatti, “we use game theory techniques in collaboration with Pierpaolo Battigalli from our Department of Decision Sciences, Carlo Chiarella from Cunef Madrid and Tommaso Orlando from Banca d' Italia”.  The second strand concerns the policies for issuing covered bonds, i.e. dual recourse bonds, with possible recourse not only against the issuer, but also against a collateral including a pool of segregated assets (typically mortgages). “In this case, we want to understand whether the issuers of covered bonds pay more than other operators for corporate bonds not enjoying the same guarantees. Giacomo Nocera (Audencia Business School) and Emilia Garcia Appendini (University of St. Gallen) collaborate on this project.
 
Stefano Gatti is also one of the most loved professors at Bocconi University and SDA Bocconi School of Management, where he teaches at the MBA and where he has won, for 15 consecutive years, the Best MBA Teacher Award. “The passion for teaching is inborn”, he comments. “When you like something, it’s easy to be good at it. I think of myself as servicing the students and if they learn without boredom, everyone is happy”.

by Fabio Todesco