The estimated values to society from long-term public projects, including climate change mitigation and infrastructure construction, are highly sensitive to the social discount rate (SDR) employed. Governmental guidance on social discounting has predominantly been based on input from expert...

We study the interplay between intragenerational and intergenerational equity in an economy with two countries producing and consuming from national capital stocks. We characterize the sustainable development path that a social planner would implement to achieve intertemporal egalitarianism. If...

In this paper, we propose a novel index for measuring intra-generational redistribution in pay-as-you-go pension schemes. Our index solely requires information on contributions and pension benefits of retirees, enabling us to measure intra-generational redistribution isolated from possible...

I study whether saving behavior reveals socially relevant intertemporal preferences. To this end, I decompose the present generation’s preference for the next into its dynastic and cross-dynastic components in a model of saving. If people are concerned about the next generation as such, then...

Continuous longevity improvements and population ageing have led countries to modify national public pension schemes by increasing the standard and early retirement ages in a discretionary, scheduled, or automatic way, and by making it harder for people to retire prematurely. To this end,...

In the context of a two-tier pension system, with a pay-as-you-go first tier and a fully funded second tier, we demonstrate that a system with a defined wage-indexed second tier performs strictly better than one with a defined contribution or defined real benefit second tier. The former...

Previous literature concludes that replacing wage taxation by taxes on a fixed factor or its rents benefits future generations. However, the effects of such steady-state gains on the transition generations have been left open. In this paper, we show that taxation of rents may also increase...

We study the evolution of interest about climate change between different actors of the population, and how the interest of those actors affect one another. We first document the evolution individually, and then provide a model of cross influences between them, that we then estimate with a VAR....

Climate policies vary widely across countries, with some countries imposing stringent emissions policies and others doing very little. When climate policies vary across countries, energy-intensive industries have an incentive to relocate to places with few or no emissions restrictions, an effect...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...