How should changes in environmental quality occurring in the future be discounted? To answer this question we consider a model of “ecological discounting,” where the representative consumer has a utility function defined over two attributes, consumption and environmental quality, which...

In this note I explore how a non-constant rate of time preference on the part of policymakers affects economic growth. In a simple dynamic general equilibrium model I show that if the incumbent government has a rate of time preference in the form of a quasi-hyperbolic discounting function tax...