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...

In Stated Preference studies for the appraisal of environmental projects in poor countries or regions it often turns out that the stated willingness to pay of people for environmental improvements, which is used as measure of individual welfare changes, is very low. This is often interpreted as...

This paper makes the case for the systematic appraisal of public sector projects using shadow prices as the signals of social scarcities. In so doing, it attempts to redress the balance between estimating inputs and outputs, central though that task is, and valuing them correctly. The account of...

Consider a public project which produces a consumption good and which benefits future generations. Let a conventional cost-benefit analysis find that it gives higher benefits than projects it would dis-place in the private sector. Voters may nevertheless oppose the public project: the...

This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing – and could therefore serve as a role model for other programs. In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel firms have lead to large-scale redundancies....

In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel mills and related firms in the metal industry have lead to large-scale redundancy plans. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This foundation acted like an independent training center, where...

This paper uses the Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle to compute the present value (PV) of a non-marginal future event. Three theoretical results stand out: First, decreasing returns to capital create a wedge between the PV of future generations' willingness to pay (WTP) and the PV of their...

The appraisal of public investments is subject to formal guidelines which often require input prices, such as forecasted energy prices. Using Danish guidelines as a case study, we explore the discounting assumptions in these input prices and find rates ranging from 2.97% to 17.5%, markedly...

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...

We demonstrate the social efficiency of investing in high-quality early childhood education using newly collected data from the HighScope Perry Preschool Project. The data analyzed are the longest follow-up of any randomized early childhood education program. Annual observations of participant...