Gollier and Weitzman (2010) show that if future consumption discount rates are uncertain and persistent, the consumption discount rate should decline to its lowest possible value for events in the most distant future. In this paper, I argue that the lowest possible growth rate of consumption per...

We examine Singapore's fairly homogeneous private-housing market and show that new apartments on historical multi-century leases trade at a non-zero discount relative to property owned in perpetuity. Descriptive regressions indicate that new apartments with 825 to 986 years of tenure remaining...

The social rate of discount is a crucial driver of the social cost of carbon (SCC), i.e. the expected present discounted value of marginal damages resulting from emitting one ton of carbon today. Policy makers should set carbon prices to the SCC using a carbon tax or a competitive permits...

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) provide key inputs to decision-makers on economically efficient climate policies, and technical change is one of the key assumptions in any IAM that estimates mitigation costs. We conduct a systematic survey of how technical change is currently represented in...

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission is currently considering a new directive to reduce the per-kilometer CO2 emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this proposal with respect to its economic and...