Uncertain, yet persistent, real rates of return to capital underpin one argument for using a declining schedule of social discount rates. Yet persistency is only present in approximately the first three-quarters of the time-series of US Treasury bond yields used by Newell and Pizer [37] to...

Policy interventions designed to simultaneously stem deforestation and reduce poverty in tropical countries entail complex socio-environmental trade-offs. A hybrid model, comprising an optimising, agricultural household model integrated into the �shell� of an agent-based model, is...

The case for using declining social discount rates when the future is uncertain is now widely accepted in both academic and policy circles. We present sharp upper and lower bounds for this term structure when we have limited knowledge about the nature of our uncertainty. At horizons beyond 75...

Recent research suggests that the long term future should be discounted with a declining discount rate. One such line of research, exemplified by Weitzman [Gamma discounting, Amer. Econ. Rev. 91 (2001) 261–271], shows that the certainty equivalent discount rate is declining when future capital...