It is widely recognized that the economics of distant-future events, like climate change, is critically dependent upon the choice of a discount rate. Unfortunately, it is unclear how to discount distant-future events when the future discount rate itself is unknown. In previous work, an analytically-tractable approach called ‘‘gamma discounting’’ was proposed, which gave a declining discount rat...

background : the present study aimed to provide better insight on methodological issues related to time preference studies, and to estimate private and social discount rates, using a rigorous systematic review and meta-analysis. methods : we searched pubmed, embase and proquest databases in june 2013. all studies had estimated private and social time preference rates for health outcomes through...

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...

This paper investigates the valuation effects of corporate international diversification by examining cross-border mergers and acquisitions of U.S. acquirers over the period 1990-1999. We find that, on average, acquisitions of “fairly valued” foreign business units do not lead to value discounts. Consistent with the industrial diversification discount literature, unrelated cross-border acquisit...

Discount rates are often used in cost-benefit analysis. Whenever costs and benefits for a household or individual are spread over time, it is essential that one calculate present-value equivalents in order to undertake meaningful comparisons. In most cases welfare analysts use market rates as the basis for these present-value calculations. Sensitivity analysis often consists of varying the scal...

In Markov Decision Processes, the discount function determines how much the reward for each point in time adds to the value of the process, and thus deeply a ects the optimal policy. Two cases of discount functions are well known and analyzed. The rst is no discounting at all, which correspond to the totaland average-reward criteria. The second case is a constant discount rate, which leads to a...

In recessions, the stock market falls more than in proportion to corporate profit. The discount rate implicit in the stock market rises. All types of investment fall, including employers’ investment in job creation. According to the leading view of unemployment—the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model—when the incentive for job creation rises, the labor market tightens and unemployment falls. Emp...