The objectives of this paper are to document the statistical characteristics of debt service cover ratios (DSCRs) in infrastructure project finance, and to develop and calibrate a model of DSCR dynamics.

For this purpose, we collect a large sample of realised DSCR observations across a range of infrastructure projects spanning more than 15 years, representing the largest such sample available for research to date, and conduct a series of statistical tests and analyses to establish the most adequate approach to modelling and predicting future DSCR levels and volatility.

Using these results, we build a model of the conditional probability distribution of DSCRs at each point in the life of infrastructure projects.