Because of the budgetary constraints imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact, the need for cost and benefit evaluation of public investment has become increasingly relevant. In a cost-benefit analysis framework, the definition of the social discount rate is key to the selection of projects and...

The accuracy of <italic>ex ante</italic> project appraisal has been subject to scrutiny by scholars in recent years. It has often been claimed that the inaccuracy of project evaluation leads to a waste of public spending. In this article I acknowledge that the appraisal of a project consists in long-run...

In this article, we present the results from a meta-analysis conducted over 44 experimental and field studies, which report individual discount rate estimates. We find in our research that the experimental design of a study has a decisive impact on these estimates, and conclude that...

This article aims at analysing the effect of temporal aggregation in space-time autoregressive models. By means of a simulation experiment, it is shown that, the greater the spatial dependence in time series, the lower the bias due to temporal aggregation. However, the ratio between the average...