In August 2007, the Office of Best Practice Regulation (then part of the Productivity Commission) published its Best Practice Regulation Handbook, containing guidelines including use of a social discount rate of 7 percent real, with sensitivity testing over the range of 3 to 11 per cent (OBPR...

It is not immediately clear how to discount distant-future events, like climate change, when the distant-future discount rate itself is uncertain. The so-called “Weitzman-Gollier puzzle” is the fact that two seemingly symmetric and equally plausible ways of dealing with uncertain future...

Weitzman's Dismal Theorem has that the expected net present value of a stock problem with a stochastic growth rate with unknown variance is unbounded. Cost-benefit analysis can therefore not be applied to greenhouse gas emission control. We use the Generalized Central Limit Theorem to show that...