The approach adopted in this paper in order to measure the US social discount rate is market-driven and relies on trade-offs in financial markets. The underlying assumptions are that public budgets displace the marginal private investment, and that US citizens borrow to finance home mortgages. The average debt capacity of the US citizen, or the representative investor, is 20%. It is argued that...

Recent debates over the economics of climate change underscore the importance of what at first blush is a narrow technical issue in welfare economics and cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Yet even before the need to study the economics of climate change, debate over both nuclear energy policy and water resource policy highlighted the fateful role that social discount rates play in policy prescriptio...

We consider an economy à la Lucas (1978, Econometrica 46, 1429–1446) with a risk-averse representative agent. The exogenous growth rate of the economy follows a random walk. We characterize the set of utility functions for which it is efficient to discount more distant cash flows at a lower rate. The benchmark result is that, when the growth rate is almost surely nonnegative, the yield curve is...

Under the dual pressures of energy crisis and environmental pollution, China’s new power industry has become a focal point for management requires greater investment. In this context, as significant input investment projects, discount rate well-calibrated evaluation because projects are highly capital intensive. The main objective paper is to evaluate industry. First, we use Moving Average corr...