Extremely low discount rates play a central role in the Stern Review's evaluation of environmental protection, and this assumption has been criticized by many economists. The Review also stresses that great uncertainty is a critical element for optimal environmental policies. An appropriate...

Nearly all discussions about the appropriate consumption discount rate for climate-change policy evaluation assume that a single discount rate concept applies. We argue that two distinct concepts and associated rates apply. We distinguish a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate appropriate for...

This article examines the economic basis for what is termed %u201Crational discounting,%u201D which entails full recognition of policy effects over time and exponential discounting at a riskless rate of return. Policies often cannot be ranked unambiguously in terms of their present or future...

We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

We develop a demographically-based approach for estimating the utility discount rate (UDR) portion of the Ramsey rule. We show how age-specific mortality rates and life expectancies imply a natural UDR for individuals at each age in a population, and these can be aggregated into a...

We exploit a volcanic “experiment" to study the costs and benefits of geographic mobility. We show that moving costs (broadly defined) are very large and labor therefore does not flow to locations where it earns the highest returns. In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were...

This paper studies how politicians and voters respond to new information on the threats of climate change. Using data on the universe of federal disaster declarations between 1989 and 2014, we document that congress members from districts hit by a hurricane are more likely to support bills...

Using the government-sponsored enterprises’ sharp securitization rules, this paper provides evidence that, in the aftermath of natural disasters, lenders are more likely to approve mortgages that can be securitized, thereby transferring climate risk. The identification strategy uses the...

How do climate risk beliefs affect coastal housing markets? This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence. First, we build a dynamic housing market model and show that belief heterogeneity can reconcile the mixed empirical evidence on flood risk capitalization into housing prices....

Sea-level rise and ensuing permanent coastal inundation will cause spatial shifts in population and economic activity over the next 200 years. Using a highly spatially disaggregated, dynamic model of the world economy that accounts for the dynamics of migration, trade, and innovation, this paper...