This line of research has investigated the possible alternatives for long-term financing in Brazil and the roles to be played by the various financial agents, including insurance companies, pension funds, venture capital funds and guarantee agencies. In addition, best practices in terms of risk management and allocation in international terms are being investigated, in order to bridge the gap that exists in our country and by introducing appropriate financial engineering tools for each phase of an infrastructure project - insurance, guarantees and derivatives. Another object of interest concerns the estimation of the regulatory rate of return, which is fundamental in the process of establishing appropriate rates of return to be perceived by users of the various utilities, while at the same time being able to properly remunerate the lenders of the regulated firm - shareholders and creditors. The classically recognized method in the field of Corporate Finance for estimating this rate is the WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) and CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) binomial, and its empirical implementation is subject to various approaches, depending on the regulated sector and the country in question. In this sense, this line of research has investigated the various variations, in terms of implementation, of the WACC/CAPM methodology, with emphasis on the analyses performed in the energy sectors (Distribution, Generation and Transmission), Natural Gas Distribution, Road and Rail Concessions. In addition, an intuitive relationship has been investigated between the required return on capital and the perception of regulatory risk in the various sectors, where there is a lack of uniformity in the use of information that would be common to all companies, as well as the impact of new business models/utilities of the future.
There is an ongoing reconfiguration of how infrastructure projects will be financed in Brazil, given the severe fiscal constraints faced and a new role to be played by traditional sources, with a focus on large public banks. In this sense, a robust process of risk analysis and allocation between public and private parties is fundamental for infrastructure assets to be taken into account again in the portfolio decisions of various types of investors in capital markets.