Private ownership and management control decisions in infrastructure from the perspective of Transaction Cost Theory: Evidence from emerging economies

From the perspective of Transaction Cost Theory, this paper proposes a conceptual model to assess ownership and management control decisions of private partners in public-private partnerships for infrastructure with regard generic risk factors, namely asset specificity, demand risk, environmental risk, social risk, macroeconomic risk, and governance or behavioral risk. Using an ordinal logistic model, hypotheses are tested on data covering 2152 projects in 12 emerging countries for the period 2010–2019. Overall results indicate that the extent of private ownership and management control is negatively related to risks, the marginal effects of which are moderated by high-quality public institutions.