In this paper we present a model designed to relate the detailed occupational and industrial demands imposed on the economy by several types of water resource investment. This detail provides the basis for adjusting the market cost of such public investments under the employment conditions...

This paper examines the social opportunity cost of a hypothetical public project in Australia and compares these values with the cost of the project as measured by factor prices. Since 2001, the Australian taxation system has included an ad valorem tax, the Goods and Services Tax, however...

This is a critique of the Arthur Maass article on Benefit Cost Analysis.

We modify a method recently suggested by Martin Weitzman (2012) for determining a risk-adjusted social discount rate (SDR) term structure consistent with both the (augmented) Ramsey rule and the consumption-based CAPM. Using this approach we estimate SDR for transportation infrastructure...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

A number of governments have already adopted the policy of applying Declining Discount Rates (DDRs) to long lived projects, a move that will significantly affect public sector investment decisions. This paper argues that such policy is misguided, and revisits the discussion that led to it. A...

A number of governments have already adopted the policy of applying Declining Discount Rates (DDRs) to long lived projects, a move that could affect public sector investment decisions. Arguments for the use of Declining Discount Rates are based on the consideration of uncertainty, both for...

The effects of a policy measure often reach the consumer only after one or more intermediatesteps, for instance because the measure lowers the cost of an input for an industry producinga consumer good. This paper is concerned with the question how to measure such indirect effectscorrectly under...

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...

In many empirical contingent valuation studies one finds that household size, i.e. the number of household members, is negatively correlated with stated household willingness to pay for the realization of environmental projects. This observation is rather puzzling because in larger households...