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...

Discounting enables to express future monetary or socio-economic effects in terms of present values when inter-temporal decisions are to be taken. In the context of the cost-benefit analysis, this allows for directly comparing net benefits expressed in terms of their net present values, and,...

The view that intergenerational distributive justice and efficiency should be treated separately is familiar, yet controversial. This article elaborates the often-implicit justifications for separate treatment and provides a more express statement of how and when such treatment is appropriate....

Various economic literatures address the question whether first-best prescriptions for government policy require modification because redistributive income taxation distorts labor supply and cannot achieve the distributive ideal. Perhaps second-best rules for public goods provision, corrective...

Should the assessment of government policies, such as the provision of public goods and the control of externalities, deviate from first-best principles to account for distributive effects and for the distortionary cost of labor income taxation? For example, is the optimal extent of public goods...

We propose a new and tractable model of fairness preferences to understand how leaders' often stated goal of intergenerational fairness influences their actions. We parameterize two distinct dimensions of fairness preferences, deterministic and stochastic fairness, to capture the heterogeneity...

The paper reexamines the welfare economics of intergenerational risk. Risk and its resolution over time are modeled as a decision tree: in each period, the consumption of the current one-period living generation is to be traded-off against uncertain benefits of future generations; as time...