This paper is mainly concerned with weighted average measures of the social discount rate, where the components of the average are the marginal productivity of investment (measured by its gross-of-tax rate of return), and the marginal rate of time preference (measured by the net-of-tax yield of...

Fragmentation and severe inequalities in health status, health infrastructure and services were among the major problems the Limpopo Provincial Government had to deal with when they took office in 1994. Hence, as part of an intensive program of legislative and policy development to reform the...

Uncertainty has an almost negligible impact on project value in the economic standard model. I show that a comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty and uncertainty attitude changes this picture fundamentally. The analysis relies on the discount rate, which is the crucial determinant in balancing...

We explored how different response times from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) to defibrillation in the County of Stockholm, Sweden, affect patients’ survival rates. This was done by combining a geographic information systems (GIS) simulation of driving times with register data on...

Climate is a persistent asset, bar none: changes in climate-related stocks have consequences spanning over centuries or possibly millennia to the future. To reconcile the discounting of such far-distant impacts and realism of the shorter-term decisions, we consider hyperbolic time-preferences in...

Nearly all discussions about the appropriate consumption discount rate for climate change policy evaluation assume that a single discount rate concept applies. We argue that two distinct concepts and associated rates apply. We distinguish between a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate...

The economics of climate change and the various measures that should be implemented to reduce future damages are highly tied to the use of cost-benefit analysis. Traditional approaches ignore the fact that environmental amenities do not experience the same growth rate as do most of the sectors...

Conventional cost-benefit rules typically assume that the alternative to the project under evaluation is “doing nothing” or “business as usual”. In this note we contrast this approach to one where the alternative is to provide another environmental good or service. We show that this...

Should public assets such as infrastructure, education, and the environment earn the same return as private investments? We consider if time-inconsistent decision-makers can gain from institutions that enforce cost-benefit rules on large projects that influence the economy as a whole. Long-term...