This paper derives the properties of the discount rate that should be applied to a public-sector project when the affected population has heterogeneous degrees of impatience. We show that, for any distribution of discount rates, the social discount rate has the following properties: it decreases...

The article titled "Autour des taux écologiques" is a study of an economic environment in which individuals don’t care only about their intertemporal flow of consumption but also about the quality of a given natural resource, say air or water, denoted hereafter environmental good.

We address the problem of a social planner who, as in Weitzman (2001), gathers data on discount rates and wants to infer the socially efficient consumption discount rate. We propose an equilibrium approach and we analyse the expression and the properties of the resulting equilibrium discount...

The objective of this paper is to adopt a general equilibrium model and determine the socially efficient discount factor and discount rate when there are heterogeneous anticipations about the future of the economy as well as heterogeneous time preference rates. Among others we tackle the...