Endogenous Discounting and Global Indeterminacy

On Optimality, Endogenous Discounting and Wealth Accumulation

We endogenize the discount rate via a broad measure of wealth and provide empirical evidence that wealth affects the discount rate negatively. We demonstrate that the Pontryagin conditions require positive felicity for intuitive results, whereas the concavity of the Hamiltonian requires negative felicity for optimality. This dilemma also holds for the endogenizations of Obstfeld (1990) and foll...

Global warming and hyperbolic discounting

The use of a constant discount rate to study long-lived environmental problems such as global warming has two disadvantages: the prescribed policy is sensitive to the discount rate, and with moderate discount rates, large future damages have almost no effect on current decisions. Timeconsistent quasi-hyperbolic discounting alleviates both of these modeling problems, and is a plausible descripti...

Fiscal policy and indeterminacy in models of endogenous growth

Endogenous indeterminacy and volatility of asset prices under ambiguity

If agents are ambiguity-averse and can invest in productive assets, asset prices can robustly exhibit indeterminacy in the markets that open after the productive investment has been launched. For indeterminacy to occur, the aggregate supply of goods must appear in precise configurations, but the investment levels that generate these supplies arise systematically. That indeterminacy arises only ...

Endogenous time preference with externalities and equilibrium indeterminacy

This paper assumes that a subjective discount factor is affected by an average level of investment in future-oriented resources in an economy (investment externalities) in addition to a level of individual investment in future-oriented resources. Under this assumption, this paper considers a maximization problem formulated as a pseudo planning problem and shows the conditions under which equili...