Economics notes: Discounting

Notes for Economics 200c*

MATHEMATICAL ECONOMICS Lecture Notes 1

1 I am especially grateful to Juergen Jung, Mike Treuden, and Nathaniel Throckmorton for their tremendous contributions to these notes. I also thank Michael Kaganovich and Eric Leeper for their guidance and for giving me the opportunity to develop and teach this course during graduate school. Several classes of Indiana and Auburn University graduate students provided suggestions and corrections...

Measurement-theoretic foundations of time discounting in economics

In economics, the concept of time discounting introduces weights on future goods to make these less valuable. Yet, both the conceptual motivation for time discounting and its specific functional form remain contested. To address these problems, this paper provides a measurement-theoretic framework of representation for time discounting. The representation theorem characterises time discounting ...

International Society for Ecological Economics Internet Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics Discounting the future

Introduction Discounting is probably one of the most disputed issues in ecological economics. Current human activities may cause immediate and long-term environmental damages. Discounting, the usual procedure to give a present value to financial flows occurring in the future, seems to give outrageously low values to future damages, and thus, to “play against” the environment and future generati...

Notes for a Course in Development Economics

Open a book — any book —on the economics of developing countries, and it will begin with the usual litany of woes. Developing countries, notwithstanding the enormous strides they have made in the last few decades, display fundamental economic inadequacies in a wide range of indicators. Levels of physical capital per person are small. Nutrition levels are low. Other indicators of human capital s...