Many governments use technology incentives as an important component of their greenhouse gas abatement strategies. These “carrots” are intended to encourage the initial diffusion of new, greenhouse-gas-emissions-reducing technologies, in contrast to carbon taxes and emissions trading which...

Public insurers face trade-offs between the individual and collective benefits they can provide given limited resources. Drug expenditure is one of the largest components of health spending and it is not clear cut what should be readily available. We study litigation as a safety valve using data...

Abstract This paper considers the evolution of cost-benefit analysis, CBA, and proposes a foundation for its current use and continued development, to be called benefit-cost analysis, BCA. In the trajectory from CBA to BCA elements of a new foundation include first a recognition that there is a...

Project management, a methodological approach that has gained the trust of many organizations, is significantly influenced by leadership and management style, playing a vital role in project success. This discussion paper attempts to underscore the role of leadership and management style in...

Infrastructures have been traditionally built, maintained and operated by the public sector. Road and railway networks, energy, electricity and water were traditionally designed in public sector headquarters in many countries until the eighties. Since then, and due to fiscal crisis and public...

High Speed Railways (HSR) is currently regarded as one of the most significant technological breakthroughs in passenger transportation developed in the second half of the 20th century. At the beginning of 2008 there were about 10,000 kilometres of new high speed lines in operation around the...

In “Gamma Discounting” Martin L. Weitzman (2001) concludes that certainty equivalent discount rates should decline significantly over time. He draws this conclusion from fitting a Gamma distribution to the responses of 2,160 economists asked to give a discount rate estimate and calculating...

A numerical model is used to experimentally compute certainty equivalent discount rates (CERs) of risk neutral and risk-averse decision makers. Investors are characterized by utility functions of the constant-intertemporal-elasticity-of-substitution (CIES) type. Stochastic interest rates are...

The Weitzman-Gollier Puzzle centered on the question of whether certainty equivalent discount rates should be growing or declining functions of time in capital markets with perfectly autocorrelated stochastic interest rates. Absent a convincing solution of the puzzle in the context of risk...

Public investment in high speed infrastructure is a priority of the Spanish government. High speed is a technological breakthrough in transport but, from an economic point of view, the question is whether is socially worthy to allocate public funds to this transport option. The answer requires a...