The uncertainty of future economic development affects the term structure of discount rates and, thus, the intertemporal weights that are to be used in cost benefit analysis. The U.K. and France have recently adopted a falling term structure to incorporate uncertainty and the U.S. is considering...

We analyze the impact of damage uncertainty on optimal mitigation policies in the integrated assessment of climate change. Usually, these models analyzeuncertainty by averaging deterministic paths. In contrast, we build a consistentmodel deriving optimal policy rules under persistent...

The paper introduces a new notion of risk aversion that is independent of the good under observation and its measure scale. The representational framework builds on a time consistent combination of additive separability on certain consumption paths and the von Neumann & Morgenstern (1944)...

The prevailing literature discusses intergenerational trade-offs in climatechange predominantly in terms of the Ramsey equation relying on the infinitelylived agent model. We discuss these trade-offs in a continuous time OLG framework and relate our results to the infinitely lived agent setting....

The paper analyzes the discount rate under uncertainty. The analysis complements the probabilistic characterization of uncertainty by a measure of confidence. Special cases of the model comprise discounting under smooth ambiguity aversion as well as discounting under a disentanglement of risk...

We model optimal policy when the probability of a tipping point, the welfare change due to a tipping point, and knowledge about a tipping point's trigger all depend on the policy path. Analytic results demonstrate how optimal policy depends on the ability to affect both the probability of a...

The paper incorporates qualitative differences of probabilistic beliefs into a rational (or normatively motivated) decision framework. Probabilistic beliefs can range from objective probabilities to pure guesstimates. The decision maker in the present model takes into account his confidence in...