A group of agents disagree about the appropriate inter temporal preferences to use when exploiting a common productive resource. They thus delegate decision making to a social planner who allocates consumption efficiently across heterogeneous individuals and over time. We define `policy...

Discount rate variation is the central organizing question of current asset pricing research. I survey facts, theories and applications. We thought returns were uncorrelated over time, so variation in price-dividend ratios was due to variation in expected cashflows. Now it seems all...

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 a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate appropriate for...

We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

The choice of discount rate has a significant impact on net benefit estimates when costs today have benefits over long time horizons. Standard U.S. government practice for cost–benefit analysis is to bound such analysis using two alternative rates. These rates are meant to represent the rate...

This paper summarizes studies that investigated the relation between temporal discounting and alcohol consumption. The first study compared heavy and light social drinkers, and the second study compared problem and light drinkers, on the degree to which they discounted the value of...

Two economies, represented by Diamond-type overlapping-generations models and differing only in their pure rates of time preference, are joined together. Capital formation, balance-of-payments behavior, and welfare are compared under autarky and openness. With a positive natural rate of growth,...

We examine the dynamic interaction of the population age structure, economic dependency, and fertility, paying particular attention to the role of intergenerational transfers. In the short run, a reduction in fertility produces a %u201Cdemographic dividend%u201D that allows for higher...

We propose a model where voters experience an emotional cost when they observe a firm that has displayed insufficient concern for other people's welfare (altruism) in the process of making high profits. Even with few truly altruistic firms, an equilibrium may emerge where all firms pretend to be...

Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating financial institutions. Altruistic public-benefits theories treat rules as governmental instruments for increas- ing fairness and efficiency across society as a whole....