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...

This article provides an overview of the literature on the psychological value of time. It discusses various determinants of the discount rate and the possibility of hyperbolic discounting. The historical approach helps us to trace the origins of the concept of psychological value of time. This...

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...

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...

This article discusses the discount rate to be used in projects that aimed at improving the environment. The model is quite stylized and involves two different goods, one is the usual consumption good whose production increases exponentially, the other is an environmental good whose quality...

In this paper, we show that behavioral features can be obtained at a group level when the individuals of the group are heterogeneous enough. More precisely, starting from a standard model of Pareto optimal allocations, with expected utility maximizers and exponential dis- counting, but allowing...

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.

In this note, we consider an economy with heterogeneous agents, differing by their time preference rate and by their beliefs. We show that at the Pareto optimum, the representative agent exhibits interesting behavioral properties. More precisely, starting from a standard model with expected...