IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3330.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public Investment as Commitment

Author

Listed:
  • Reyer Gerlagh
  • Matti Liski

Abstract

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 public investments provide commitment to current preferences, leading to investment biases in such assets. The institutionalized cost-benefit prudence eliminates such biases but we show that this behavioral rule has no general social value: it implements Pareto efficiency if and only if preferences are time-consistent, and decreases welfare otherwise. We find that the long-term cost-benefit prudence is fundamentally about income transfers to the future, implying that efficient behavioral rules should target savings directly rather than the division of current investment resources.

Suggested Citation

  • Reyer Gerlagh & Matti Liski, 2011. "Public Investment as Commitment," CESifo Working Paper Series 3330, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3330
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3330.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arrow, Kenneth J. & Cropper, Maureen L. & Eads, George C. & Hahn, Robert W. & Lave, Lester B. & Noll, Roger G. & Portney, Paul R. & Russell, Milson & Schmalensee, Richard & Smith, V. Kerry & Stavins, , 1997. "Is there a role for benefit-cost analysis in environmental, health, and safety regulation?," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(2), pages 195-221, May.
    2. Saez-Marti, Maria & Weibull, Jorgen W., 2005. "Discounting and altruism to future decision-makers," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 122(2), pages 254-266, June.
    3. Andrew Caplin & John Leahy, 2004. "The Social Discount Rate," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(6), pages 1257-1268, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hiraguchi, Ryoji, 2016. "On a two-sector endogenous growth model with quasi-geometric discounting," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 26-35.
    2. Vollebergh, Herman & Brink, Corjan & Verdonk, Martijn & Roelfsema, Mark, 2013. "Evaluation of Policy Options to Reform the EU Emissions Trading System - Effects on Carbon Price, Emissions and the Economy," Other publications TiSEM 76a2d0f3-cda8-48e8-a881-d, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    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. Reyer Gerlagh, 2012. "Carbon Prices for the Next Thousand Years," Review of Environment, Energy and Economics - Re3, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, August.
    2. Bård Harstad, 2013. "Investment Policy for Time-Inconsistent Discounters," CESifo Working Paper Series 4546, CESifo.
    3. Nesje, Frikk, 2020. "Cross-dynastic Intergenerational Altruism," Working Papers 0678, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    4. Maria Arvaniti & Chandra K. Krishnamurthy & Anne-Sophie Crépin, 2019. "Time-consistent resource management with regime shifts," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 19/329, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    5. John A. List, 2024. "Optimally generate policy-based evidence before scaling," Nature, Nature, vol. 626(7999), pages 491-499, February.
    6. Valeria Bonis & Luca Spataro, 2018. "Optimal income taxation and migration," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 25(4), pages 867-882, August.
    7. Stavins, Robert & Hahn, Robert & Cavanagh, Sheila, 2001. "National Environmental Policy During the Clinton Years," RFF Working Paper Series dp-01-38, Resources for the Future.
    8. Matthias Doepke, 2013. "Exploitation, altruism, and social welfare," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 12(4), pages 375-391, November.
    9. Stavins, Robert, 2004. "Environmental Economics," RFF Working Paper Series dp-04-54, Resources for the Future.
    10. Maya Eden, 2023. "The Cross‐Sectional Implications of the Social Discount Rate," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 91(6), pages 2065-2088, November.
    11. Pedro Linares & Xavier Labandeira, 2010. "Energy Efficiency: Economics And Policy," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(3), pages 573-592, July.
    12. Di Vita, Giuseppe, 2008. "Is the discount rate relevant in explaining the Environmental Kuznets Curve?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 191-207.
    13. Ronald W. Spahr & Pankaj K. Jain & Fariz Huseynov & Bhavik Rajesh Parikh, 2012. "Tax policy and macro-finance in a competitive global economy where government is considered as firms' third financial stakeholder," Global Business and Economics Review, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 14(1/2), pages 30-66.
    14. de la Croix, David & Doepke, Matthias, 2021. "A soul’s view of the optimal population problem," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 98-108.
    15. Alexander Ludwig & Michael Reiter, 2010. "Sharing Demographic Risk--Who Is Afraid of the Baby Bust?," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 83-118, November.
    16. Levy-Yeyati, Eduardo & Sturzenegger, Federico, 2007. "A Balance-Sheet Approach to Fiscal Sustainability," Working Paper Series rwp07-044, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    17. Bloom, David E. & Chen, Simiao & Kuhn, Michael & McGovern, Mark E. & Oxley, Les & Prettner, Klaus, 2020. "The economic burden of chronic diseases: Estimates and projections for China, Japan, and South Korea," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 17(C).
    18. Geir B. Asheim & Frikk Nesje, 2016. "Destructive Intergenerational Altruism," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(4), pages 957-984.
    19. Guest, Ross, 2010. "The economics of sustainability in the context of climate change: An overview," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 45(4), pages 326-335, October.
    20. John Creedy & Ross Guest, 2008. "Sustainable Preferences and Damage Abatement:Value Judgments and Implications for Consumption Streams," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 1026, The University of Melbourne.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    public investments; cost-benefit analysis; inconsistent preferences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    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:ces:ceswps:_3330. 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: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.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.