News

LSF Professor moderates infrastructure panel at 2019 AIIB Meeting

  • Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF)
    31 July 2019
  • Category
    Research
  • Topic
    Finance

Prof. Roman Kräussl from the Luxembourg School of Finance (LSF) moderated in mid-July a panel discussion on “Debt Sustainability and Macroeconomic Issues in Infrastructure” as part of the 2019 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s Annual Meeting (AIIB) hosted in Luxembourg.

Panelists included Ms. Zeti Akhtar Aziz, (Former Governor of Malaysia’s Central Bank, panel member for AIIB International Advisory), Mr. Bambang Permadi Brodjonegoro, (Minister for National Development Planning in Indonesia), Mr. Philip Hammond, (Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom) and Mr. Takatoshi Kato (Senior Adviser at the Japan Center for International Finance), as well as Mr. Martin Kimmig,(Chief Risk Officer at AIIB) and Mr. Wencai Zhang, (General Director at the Ministry of Finance in China).

“We had a very successful and interesting panel on debt sustainability and infrastructure implications,” Prof. Kräussl said following the event, praising the participation of senior experts from Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, as well as the input of various top representatives from the AIIB.

“We concluded that sustainability is key for the future success of infrastructure investment,” he also said, adding that “public-private partnerships are highly relevant”, that “they have to focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors”, while also stressing the importance of individual investments made into infrastructure.

The two-day event marked the AIIB’s 4th annual meeting and first of its kind outside of Asia and allowed the bank’s governors and directors to engage with delegations from members, prospective members, partner institutions, business leaders, civil society and experts from a range of fields.

A visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Prof. Kräussl recently travelled to the United States to present his latest research on the risk and return characteristics of infrastructure investments. Co-authored with Aleksandar Andonov, Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Amsterdam, and Joshua Rauh, Director of Research and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as Finance Professor at Stanford University, Prof. Kräussl’s research paper investigates infrastructure as an asset class from the perspective of a limited partner.

Prof. Kräussl has published extensively in leading economic journals such as The Review of Financial Studies and his work has been cited in The Economist, FT, WSJ, NYT, Forbes, among others.