This paper considers optimal social insurance in a dynamic moral hazard economy. The existing literature has focussed on environments in which a planner and a population of agents share the same discount factor. A key finding is that agents are then almost surely immiserated; their welfare is driven to its lowest bound. Such immiseration requires a social commitment to treat (almost) everyone a...

This paper derives a model in which workers have firm-specific and industry-specific skills, and in each period there is a non-zero probability that a worker quits. The quitting probability makes the private discount rate (used by firms in making decisions about firing workers) higher than the social discount rate. This generates a “quitting externality”, where firms lay off too many workers in...

The objective of this paper is to determine the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. We suppose that there is an exogenous process for the growth of consumption per capita, which is stochastic. We first evaluate the determinants of the discount rate for a specific horizon when the representative agent has a recursive ...

To justify substantial carbon emission reductions, recent literature on cost-benefit analysis of climate change suggests discounting environmental quality at a lower discount rate than the standard consumption discount rate. Recent literature also shows that a theoretical foundation for such a lower environmental discount rate requires rising willingness-to-pay for environmental quality (WTP). ...

The forensic economics literature hosts a continuing debate about the appropriateness of using historical verses current rates to predict future net discount rates. If the net discount rate series is stationary, which means that shocks are transitory and the series reverts to a long-term mean value, estimates based on historical values are reasonable. Alternatively, if the series exhibits a uni...

Alternative policy options available to northern Benguela fisheries managers were explored using Ecopath with Ecosim. Scenarios were tested for optimizing the discounted profit from the fisheries in the ecosystem, maximizing the jobs that can be provided by the fisheries, maximizing a measure of ecosystem status, and analyzing tradeoffs between these management options. Additionally, two differ...

The paper aims to contribute to the understanding of why there is a lack of domestic saving and investment in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on heterogeneity in inter-temporal preferences as a possible explanation of this important puzzle. The study is based on a unique experimental data set collected from 856 respondents in Ugandan villages and scrutinizes how individual patienc...