IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ajw/wpaper/06956.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Social Discount Rate: A Baseline Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Broughel, James

    (Mercury Publication)

Abstract

Economists discount future benefit and cost flows for a variety of reasons, including time preference, diminishing marginal utility of consumption, opportunity cost of capital, and risk aversion. Many of these rationales for discounting can be explained u

Suggested Citation

  • Broughel, James, 2017. "The Social Discount Rate: A Baseline Approach," Working Papers 06956, George Mason University, Mercatus Center.
    • Handle: RePEc:ajw:wpaper:06956
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mercury.mercatus.org/Product/ViewFinalCopy/344
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephen A. Marglin, 1963. "The Social Rate of Discount and The Optimal Rate of Investment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 77(1), pages 95-111.
    2. Cropper, Maureen, 2012. "How Should Benefits and Costs Be Discounted in an Intergenerational Context?," RFF Working Paper Series dp-12-42, Resources for the Future.
    3. Gollier, Christian & Weitzman, Martin L., 2010. "How should the distant future be discounted when discount rates are uncertain?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(3), pages 350-353, June.
    4. Weitzman, Martin L., 1998. "Why the Far-Distant Future Should Be Discounted at Its Lowest Possible Rate," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 201-208, November.
    5. Gollier, Christian, 2004. "Maximizing the expected net future value as an alternative strategy to gamma discounting," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 1(2), pages 85-89, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cees Withagen, 2022. "On Simple Rules for the Social Cost of Carbon," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 82(2), pages 461-481, June.
    2. Gollier, Christian, 2016. "Gamma discounters are short-termist," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 83-90.
    3. Fleurbaey, Marc & Zuber, Stéphane, 2015. "Discounting, risk and inequality: A general approach," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 34-49.
    4. Bernard Lapeyre & Emile Quinet, 2017. "A Simple GDP-based Model for Public Investments at Risk," Post-Print hal-01666574, HAL.
    5. Freeman, Mark C. & Groom, Ben, 2016. "How certain are we about the certainty-equivalent long term social discount rate?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 152-168.
    6. Freeman, Mark C. & Groom, Ben & Panopoulou, Ekaterini & Pantelidis, Theologos, 2015. "Declining discount rates and the Fisher Effect: Inflated past, discounted future?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 32-49.
    7. Riccardo Rebonato & Riccardo Ronzani & Lionel Melin, 2023. "Robust management of climate risk damages," Risk Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 25(3), pages 1-43, September.
    8. Kollenberg, Sascha & Taschini, Luca, 2016. "Emissions trading systems with cap adjustments," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 20-36.
    9. Szekeres, Szabolcs, 2015. "Governments Should Not Use Declining Discount Rates in Project Analysis," MPRA Paper 63438, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Traeger, Christian P., 2012. "What's the Rate? Disentangling the Weitzman and the Gollier Effect," CUDARE Working Papers 121932, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
    11. Eric Fesselmeyer & Haoming Liu & Alberto Salvo, 2022. "Declining discount rates in Singapore's market for privately developed apartments," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(2), pages 330-350, March.
    12. Mark C. Freeman & Ben Groom, 2015. "Positively Gamma Discounting: Combining the Opinions of Experts on the Social Discount Rate," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 125(585), pages 1015-1024, June.
    13. Rick van der Ploeg, 2020. "Discounting and Climate Policy," CESifo Working Paper Series 8441, CESifo.
    14. Szekeres, Szabolcs, 2016. "Testing Gollier and Weitzman’s Solution of the “Weitzman-Gollier Puzzle”," MPRA Paper 72593, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Desheng Wu & Shuzhen Chen, 2017. "Benchmarking Discount Rate in Natural Resource Damage Assessment with Risk Aversion," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 37(8), pages 1522-1531, August.
    16. Cameron Hepburn & Greer Gosnell, 2014. "Evaluating impacts in the distant future: cost–benefit analysis, discounting and the alternatives," Chapters, in: Giles Atkinson & Simon Dietz & Eric Neumayer & Matthew Agarwala (ed.), Handbook of Sustainable Development, chapter 9, pages 140-159, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    17. Mareike Schad & Jürgen John, 2012. "Towards a social discount rate for the economic evaluation of health technologies in Germany: an exploratory analysis," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 13(2), pages 127-144, April.
    18. Buchholz Wolfgang & Heindl Peter, 2015. "Ökonomische Herausforderungen des Klimawandels," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, De Gruyter, vol. 16(4), pages 324-350, December.
    19. Rafał Buła & Monika Foltyn-Zarychta, 2022. "Declining Discount Rates for Energy Policy Investments in CEE EU Member Countries," Energies, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-27, December.
    20. Wolfgang Buchholz, 2014. "Discounting in an Uncertain World - Disentangling the Debate on the Weitzman-Gollier Puzzle," CESifo Working Paper Series 4967, CESifo.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ajw:wpaper:06956. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jim Ronyak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mcgmuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.