A Model of Infrastructure Financing

Infrastructure projects involve multiple parties: a government, private sector firms that build and manage, and outside investors who supply financing. Private sector firms need incentives to implement and maintain the projects well; governments may lack commitment not to extort cash flows (for instance, by limiting user fees) from projects once implemented. This double moral hazard problem limits the willingness of outside investors to fund infrastructure projects. To ameliorate these two moral hazards, we show that the optimal design of infrastructure financing features (I) government guarantees to investors against project failure; (II) bundling of development rights for the private sector and investors; (III) tax subsidies to the private parties out of infrastructure externalities; and, (IV) “general obligation” financing in the form of cross-guarantees between high-quality projects and “revenue only” financing without cross-guarantees for low-quality projects. These features are found to be relevant to the practice of infrastructure financing