This paper examines the well-known tension between discounting and sustainability in the long-term management of environmental resources. The paper describes a rights-based ethical framework in which present decision-makers hold a moral duty to ensure that life opportunities are sustained from...

A deontological (or "Kantian") approach to intergenerational fairness suggests that sustainability criteria should be imposed as prior constraints on the maximization of social preferences concerning the distribution of welfare between present and future generations. In particular, it is...

This paper explores the relationship between sustainability concepts and contractarian principles of distributional fairness. A commitment to equality of opportunity between contemporaries entails that life opportunities should be nondiminishing from generation to generation. Defining...

The potential for climate catastrophes, represented by 'fat-tailed' distributions on consequences, has attracted much attention recently. To date, however, most integrated assessment models have either been largely deterministic or deterministic with ex-post sensitivity analysis. The conclusions...

Recent studies suggest that direct preferences regarding investment gains and losses may significantly affect people’s behavior in financial markets. The present paper shows that this hypothesis has striking implications for the choice of discount rates in cost-benefit analysis. The paper...