It turns out that infrastructure funds manage airport concessions quite well. At least, that seems to be the conclusion of a recently published working study of airport operations and financial performance.
The new working paper is titled All Clear for Takeoff: Evidence from Airports on the Effects of Infrastructure Privatization. The lead author of the study is Sabrina Howell of NYU-Stern, along with coauthors Yeejin Jang, Hyeik Kim, and Michael S. Weisbach. The authors developed a massive data set of 2,444 airports with more than 10,000 annual passengers across 217 countries. They then identified 437 airports that underwent some form of privatization or concession over the study period, and added airport financial and operational performance data for each airport-year of the study. The study also included country data on factors such as corruption, governance, GDP and pricing regulations. The authors even collected information on airport industry awards and used satellite imagery before and after transactions to roughly measure capex and airport expansion. It is very likely the most comprehensive study of airport operations, let alone concessions, to date.
