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...

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...

Excessively devaluing delayed reinforcers co-occurs with a wide variety of clinical conditions such as drug dependence, obesity, and excessive gambling. If excessive delay discounting is a trans-disease process that underlies the choice behavior leading to these and other negative health conditions, efforts to change an individual's discount rate are arguably important. Although discount rate i...

Nearly all discussions about the appropriate consumption discount rate for climate-change policy evaluation assume that a single discount rate concept applies. We argue that two distinct concepts and associated rates apply. We distinguish a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate (rSW) appropriate for determining whether a given policy would augment social welfare (according to a postulated soc...