IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/hal-01300594.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Discounting, risk and inequality: A general approach

Author

Listed:
  • Stéphane Zuber

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Marc Fleurbaey

    (Woodrow Wilson School and Center for Human Values - Princeton University)

Abstract

The common practice consists in using a unique value of the discount rate for all public investments. Endorsing a social welfare approach to discounting, we show how different public investments should be discounted depending on: the risk on the returns on investment, the systematic risk on aggregate consumption, the distribution of gains and losses, and inequality. We also study the limit value of the discount rate for very long term investments. We highlight the type of information that is needed about long-term scenarios in order to evaluate investments.

Suggested Citation

  • Stéphane Zuber & Marc Fleurbaey, 2015. "Discounting, risk and inequality: A general approach," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-01300594, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-01300594
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.05.003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blackorby,Charles & Bossert,Walter & Donaldson,David J., 2005. "Population Issues in Social Choice Theory, Welfare Economics, and Ethics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521532587, October.
    2. Azar, Christian & Sterner, Thomas, 1996. "Discounting and distributional considerations in the context of global warming," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 169-184, November.
    3. Bronwyn H. Hall, 2010. "Measuring the Returns to R&D: The Depreciation Problem," NBER Chapters, in: Contributions in Memory of Zvi Griliches, pages 341-381, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Marc Fleurbaey, 2010. "Assessing Risky Social Situations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 118(4), pages 649-680, August.
    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.
    6. Broome, John, 2006. "Weighing Lives," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199297702.
    7. Martin L. Weitzman, 2009. "On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 91(1), pages 1-19, February.
    8. Fleurbaey, Marc & Zuber, Stéphane, 2015. "Discounting, beyond utilitarianism," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 9, pages 1-52.
    9. Anthoff, David & Hepburn, Cameron & Tol, Richard S.J., 2009. "Equity weighting and the marginal damage costs of climate change," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(3), pages 836-849, January.
    10. Hall, Bronwyn H. & Mairesse, Jacques & Mohnen, Pierre, 2010. "Measuring the Returns to R&D," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1033-1082, Elsevier.
    11. Martin L. Weitzman, 2007. "A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 45(3), pages 703-724, September.
    12. Zuber, Stéphane & Asheim, Geir B., 2012. "Justifying social discounting: The rank-discounted utilitarian approach," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(4), pages 1572-1601.
    13. Antoine Bommier & Stéphane Zuber, 2008. "Can preferences for catastrophe avoidance reconcile social discounting with intergenerational equity?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 31(3), pages 415-434, October.
    14. Gollier, Christian, 2002. "Discounting an uncertain future," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(2), pages 149-166, August.
    15. Millner, Antony, 2013. "On welfare frameworks and catastrophic climate risks," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 310-325.
    16. Partha Dasgupta, 2008. "Discounting climate change," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 37(2), pages 141-169, December.
    17. Ng, Yew-Kwang, 1989. "What Should We Do About Future Generations?," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(2), pages 235-253, October.
    18. Marc Fleurbaey & Stéphane Zuber, 2012. "Climate policies deserve a negative discount rate," Working Papers halshs-00728193, HAL.
    19. Gollier, Christian, 2015. "Discounting, inequality and economic convergence," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 53-61.
    20. 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.
    21. Geir B. Asheim & Stéphane Zuber, 2014. "Probability Adjusted Rank-Discounted Utilitarianism," CESifo Working Paper Series 4728, CESifo.
    22. 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.
    23. William D. Nordhaus, 2007. "A Review of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 45(3), pages 686-702, September.
    24. Christian P. Traeger, 2009. "Recent Developments in the Intertemporal Modeling of Uncertainty," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 261-285, September.
    25. Blackorby, Charles & Donaldson, David, 1984. "Social criteria for evaluating population change," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1-2), pages 13-33, November.
    26. David Pearce, 2003. "The Social Cost of Carbon and its Policy Implications," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 19(3), pages 362-384.
    27. Gramlich, Edward M, 1994. "Infrastructure Investment: A Review Essay," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 32(3), pages 1176-1196, September.
    28. Antony Millner, 2013. "On Welfare Frameworks and Catastrophic Climate Risks," CESifo Working Paper Series 4442, CESifo.
    29. Christian Gollier, 2010. "Discounting, Inequalities and Economic Convergence," CESifo Working Paper Series 3262, CESifo.
    30. -, 2009. "The economics of climate change," Sede Subregional de la CEPAL para el Caribe (Estudios e Investigaciones) 38679, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL).
    31. Gierlinger, Johannes & Gollier, Christian, 2008. "Socially Efficient Discounting under Ambiguity Aversion," IDEI Working Papers 561, Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse.
    32. Stern,Nicholas, 2007. "The Economics of Climate Change," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521700801, October.
    33. Christian Gollier, 2012. "Pricing the Planet's Future: The Economics of Discounting in an Uncertain World," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 9894.
    34. Samuel Fankhauser & Richard Tol & DAVID Pearce, 1997. "The Aggregation of Climate Change Damages: a Welfare Theoretic Approach," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 10(3), pages 249-266, October.
    35. repec:hal:pseose:hal-01300618 is not listed on IDEAS
    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. Loïc Berger & Johannes Emmerling, 2020. "Welfare As Equity Equivalents," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 727-752, September.
    2. Jean-Marc Bonnisseau & Alain Chateauneuf & Jean-Pierre Drugeon, 2023. "On Future Allocations of Scarce Resources without Explicit Discounting Factors," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 23004, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    3. Louis Eeckhoudt & Elisa Pagani & Eugenio Peluso, 2023. "Multidimensional risk aversion: the cardinal sin," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 320(1), pages 15-31, January.
    4. Tangren Feng & Shaowei Ke, 2018. "Social Discounting and Intergenerational Pareto," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 86(5), pages 1537-1567, September.
    5. Berger, Loïc & Emmerling, Johannes, 2017. "Welfare as Simple(x) Equity Equivalents," MITP: Mitigation, Innovation and Transformation Pathways 254044, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    6. Adler, Matthew D. & Treich, Nicolas, 2017. "Utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and intergenerational equity: A cake eating model," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 94-102.
    7. Fleurbaey, Marc & Zuber, Stéphane, 2015. "Discounting, beyond utilitarianism," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 9, pages 1-52.
    8. Moritz A. Drupp & Ulrike Kornek & Jasper N. Meya & Lutz Sager, 2021. "Inequality and the Environment: The Economics of a Two-Headed Hydra," CESifo Working Paper Series 9447, CESifo.
    9. Asplund, Disa, 2022. "The welfare-maximizing discount rate in a small open economy," Working Papers 2022:2, Swedish National Road & Transport Research Institute (VTI).
    10. Maya Eden, 2023. "The Cross‐Sectional Implications of the Social Discount Rate," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 91(6), pages 2065-2088, November.
    11. Tamai, Toshiki, 2023. "The rate of discount on public investments with future bias in an altruistic overlapping generations model," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    12. Frikk Nesje & Moritz A. Drupp & Mark C. Freeman & Ben Groom, 2022. "Philosophers and Economists Can Agree on the Intergenerational Discount Rate and Climate Policy Paths," CESifo Working Paper Series 9930, CESifo.
    13. Jasper N. Meya & Stefan Baumgärtner & Moritz A. Drupp & Martin F. Quaas, 2020. "Inequality and the Value of Public Natural Capital," CESifo Working Paper Series 8752, CESifo.

    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. Fleurbaey, Marc & Zuber, Stéphane, 2015. "Discounting, beyond utilitarianism," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 9, pages 1-52.
    2. Matthew Adler & Nicolas Treich, 2015. "Prioritarianism and Climate Change," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 62(2), pages 279-308, October.
    3. Piacquadio, Paolo G., 2020. "The ethics of intergenerational risk," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 186(C).
    4. Tol, Richard S.J., 2013. "Targets for global climate policy: An overview," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(5), pages 911-928.
    5. W. Botzen & Jeroen Bergh, 2014. "Specifications of Social Welfare in Economic Studies of Climate Policy: Overview of Criteria and Related Policy Insights," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 58(1), pages 1-33, May.
    6. 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.
    7. Aurélie Méjean & Antonin Pottier & Marc Fleurbaey & Stéphane Zuber, 2020. "Catastrophic climate change, population ethics and intergenerational equity," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 163(2), pages 873-890, November.
    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. Aurélie Méjean & Antonin Pottier & Stéphane Zuber & Marc Fleurbaey, 2017. "Intergenerational equity under catastrophic climate change," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 17040, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    10. Richard S J Tol, 2018. "The Economic Impacts of Climate Change," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 12(1), pages 4-25.
    11. 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.
    12. Adler, Matthew & Treich, Nicolas, 2014. "Consumption, Risk and Prioritarianism," TSE Working Papers 14-500, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    13. Adler, Matthew D. & Treich, Nicolas, 2017. "Utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and intergenerational equity: A cake eating model," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 94-102.
    14. Moritz Drupp & Mark Freeman & Ben Groom & Frikk Nesje, 2015. "Discounting disentangled: an expert survey on the determinants of the long-term social discount rate," GRI Working Papers 196a, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
    15. Rick van der Ploeg, 2020. "Discounting and Climate Policy," CESifo Working Paper Series 8441, CESifo.
    16. David Anthoff & Richard Tol, 2009. "The Impact of Climate Change on the Balanced Growth Equivalent: An Application of FUND," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 43(3), pages 351-367, July.
    17. David Anthoff & Johannes Emmerling, 2019. "Inequality and the Social Cost of Carbon," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 6(2), pages 243-273.
    18. Buchholz Wolfgang & Heindl Peter, 2015. "Ökonomische Herausforderungen des Klimawandels," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, De Gruyter, vol. 16(4), pages 324-350, December.
    19. Tol, Richard S. J., 2011. "Modified Ramsey Discounting for Climate Change," Papers WP368, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
    20. Christian Traeger, 2014. "Why uncertainty matters: discounting under intertemporal risk aversion and ambiguity," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(3), pages 627-664, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social discounting; Risk; Inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate

    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:hal:cesptp:hal-01300594. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.