The Stern/Nordhaus controversy has polarized the widely disparate beliefs about what to do in order to tackle the climate challenge. To explain differences in results and policy recommendations, comments following the publication of the Stern Review have mainly focused on the role played by the...

The standard neoclassical growth model with Cobb-Douglas production predicts a monotonically declining saving rate, when reasonably calibrated. Ample empirical evidence, however, shows that the transition paths of most countries' saving rates exhibit a statistically significant hump-shaped...

Inequity plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in many dimensions.We revisit the concept of inequity, whether across states of world (uncertainty), across individuals (inequality) and across generations (intergenerational equity), using a common framework generalizing the...

The aim of this paper is to present an alternative methodology for discounting far distant future externalities genereted by an investment project: time-declining discount rates. First I present the experimental evidence on individuals' time-inconsistency. Second I consider the theoretical...

Cost-benefit analyses require comparing costs and benefits that occur at different points in time. Doing so, however, creates conflicts between short-term considerations a discounting scheme has to be consistent with observed behaviours and long-term ethical issues a discounting scheme must not...