All pages with keywords: discounting
The climate beta
This paper examines the question of whether fighting climate change has the additional advantage of reducing the aggregate risk borne by future generations. This raises the question of the ‘climate beta’, i.e. the elasticity of climate damages with respect to a change in aggregate consumption. read more »
Appropriate time discounting in the public sector
A substantial literature of social discounting has now extended over more than 50 years, but practical approaches in developed economies and international bodies continue to vary widely. This is sometimes … read more »
Spaces for Agreement: A Theory of Time-Stochastic Dominance and an Application to Climate Change
Many investments involve both a long time horizon and risky returns. Making investment decisions thus requires assumptions about time and risk preferences. Such assumptions are frequently contested, particularly in the … read more »
How certain are we about the certainty-equivalent long term social discount rate?
The case for using declining social discount rates when the future is uncertain is now widely accepted in both academic and policy circles. We present sharp … read more »
Spaces for agreement: a theory of Time-Stochastic Dominance
Many investments involve both a long time-horizon and risky returns. Making investment decisions thus requires assumptions about time and risk preferences. In the public sector in … read more »
Is there space for agreement on climate change? A non-parametric approach to policy evaluation
Economic evaluation of climate policy is notoriously dependent on assumptions about time and risk preferences, since reducing greenhouse gas emissions today has a highly uncertain pay-off, … read more »
Non-identical quadruplets: four new estimates of the elasticity of marginal utility for the UK
This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the value of the elasticity of marginal utility for the United Kingdom. This parameter is a key determinant of … read more »
Discounting under disagreement
NBER Working Paper. A group of agents disagree about the appropriate inter temporal preferences to use when exploiting a common productive resource. read more »
Declining discount rates and the Fisher Effect: inflated past, discounted future?
Uncertain, yet persistent, real rates of return to capital underpin one argument for using a declining schedule of social discount rates. Yet persistency is only present … read more »
Climate policy under sustainable discounted utilitarianism
Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is controversial, both due to the conditions through which … read more »
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