By using their financial reserves efficiently, pension funds can smooth shocks on asset returns, and can thus facilitate intergenerational risk-sharing. In addition to the primary benefit of improved time diversification, this form of risk allocation affords the additional benefit of allowing...

Weitzman (1998) showed that when future interest rates are uncertain, using the expected net present value implies a term structure of discount rates that is decreasing to the smallest possible interest rate. On the contrary, using the expected net future value criterion implies an increasing...

It is not immediately clear how to discount distant-future events, like climate change, when the distant-future discount rate itself is uncertain. The so-called Weitzman-Gollier puzzle is the fact that two seemingly symmetric and equally plausible ways of dealing with uncertain future discount...

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of inequalities and economic convergence on the efficient discount rate, in the absence of any risk-sharing scheme. We consider an economy in which the initial consumption level and the distribution of consumption growth are heterogeneous. The...

How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

The efficient rate of return of a zero-coupon bond with maturity t is determined by our expectations about the mean (+), variance (-) and skewness (+) of the growth of aggregate consumption between 0 and t. The shape of the yield curve is thus determined by how these moments vary with t. We...

We examine a static one-risk-free-one-risky asset portfolio choice when the investor's wellbeing is affected by the anticipatory feelings associated to potential capital gains and losses. These feelings can be manipulated by the choice of subjective beliefs on the distribution of returns....

We explore the various arguments for and against the recommendation that younger households should invest a larger share of their pension wealth in risky assets. The ability of young agents to compensate their financial losses by saving more during their career provides the strongest argument in...