"Evergreen vs Traditional Private Equity Funds: A Comparative Study with a Focus on Infrastructure Investments"

The private equity industry is currently undergoing a structural transformation driven by a declining fundraising landscape (mainly attributable to the recent decade’s financial difficulties and geopolitical tensions) and by the increasing investor’s demand for liquidity, diversification and flexibility in their investments. As a consequence the industry is characterized by the proliferation of Evergreen funds, which are reshaping how capital is raised, deployed, and returned to investors. Alongside this importance change of landscape, also infrastructure has recently consolidated its position as a distinct and increasingly strategic asset class thanks to the increased recognition among industry experts and characterised by long-term essential assets, inflation-linked and resilient cash flows, and a growing role in enabling global megatrends such as the energy transition and digitalisation. This thesis has the purpose to investigate this evolution of private equity structures with a focus on the rise of open-end vehicles and their implications for liquidity management, valuation, and long-term value creation. Building on an initial overview of the development of Private Equity in the US, Europe, and Italy, the analysis reviews the most important regulatory frameworks influencing market practices (in particular AIFMD, SFDR, PRIIPs and, notably, ELTIF 2.0), assessing how institutional, legal, and market factors have enabled a broader access to private equity investments. Particular emphasis is placed on infrastructure, whose stable income profile and long asset duration naturally complement perpetual investment horizons. In contrast to traditional closed-end funds, which typically have a pre-defined lifespan of roughly ten years, Evergreen vehicles are perpetual as they allow investors to enter and exit the fund at regular intervals based on the fund’s net asset value (NAV). The thesis provides a comparative analysis of the two structures across capital formation, liquidity tools, valuation methodologies, fee models, and performance measurement. Specific attention is given to liquidity-management challenges inherent to semi-liquid evergreen funds, including NAV-based entry and exit, reliance on secondaries, liquidity sleeves, lock-ups, gates, and the structural mismatch between redemption features and illiquid underlying assets. Evidence from market data and recent industry research highlights how overcommitment strategies, distribution rates, and cash-flow dynamics affect the sustainability of perpetual-capital vehicles, particularly during periods of reduced subscriptions or stressed market conditions. Furthermore, the updated ELTIF 2.0 regime is evaluated for its role in widening retail access to private markets while enhancing governance, liquidity-management requirements, and transparency standards for open-end AIFs. This regulatory evolution is shown to support the democratisation of Private Equity and to facilitate the development of semi-liquid evergreen structures, especially in infrastructure strategies. Overall, the findings indicate that evergreen funds represent a credible and increasingly relevant complement, not merely an alternative, to traditional closed-end vehicles, particularly in asset classes where long-term ownership maximises value. At the same time, the analysis underscores persistent structural vulnerabilities, notably the sustainability of periodic liquidity in markets fundamentally characterised by illiquidity. These insights lay the analytical foundation for the subsequent case study, which compares a real example of an open-end and closed-end infrastructure fund in terms of long-term value creation, liquidity management and valuation differences.