scholarly journals A generalization of Ramsey rule on discount rate with regime switching

2018 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 147-150
Author(s):  
Seyoung Park
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz A. Drupp ◽  
Mark C. Freeman ◽  
Ben Groom ◽  
Frikk Nesje

The economic values of investing in long-term public projects are highly sensitive to the social discount rate (SDR). We surveyed over 200 experts to disentangle disagreement on the risk-free SDR into its component parts, including pure time preference, the wealth effect, and return to capital. We show that the majority of experts do not follow the simple Ramsey Rule, a widely used theoretical discounting framework, when recommending SDRs. Despite disagreement on discounting procedures and point values, we obtain a surprising degree of consensus among experts, with more than three-quarters finding the median risk-free SDR of 2 percent acceptable. (JEL C83, D61, D82, H43, Q58)


Author(s):  
Maddalena Ferranna

The debate on the economics of climate change has focused primarily on the choice of the social discount rate, which plays a key role in determining the desirability of climate policies given the long-term impacts of climate damages. Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey Rule dominate the debate on discounting. The chapter examines the appropriateness of the utilitarian framework for evaluating public policies. More specifically, it focuses on the risky dimension of climate change, and on the failure of utilitarianism in expressing both concerns for the distribution of risks across the population and concerns for the occurrence of catastrophic outcomes. The chapter shows how a shift to the prioritarian paradigm is able to capture those types of concerns, and briefly sketches the main implications for the choice of the social discount rate.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Emmerling

AbstractWe study the social discount rate, taking into account inequality within generations, that is, across countries or individuals. We show that if inequality decreases over time, the social discount rate should be lower than the one obtained by the standard Ramsey rule under certain but reasonable conditions. Applied to the global discount rate and due to the projected convergence across countries, this implies that the inequality adjusted discount rate should be about twice as high as the standard Ramsey rule predicts. For individual countries on the other hand, where inequality tends to increase over time, the effect goes in the other direction. For the United States for instance, this inequality effect leads to a reduction of the social discount rate by about 0.5 to 1 percentage points. We also present an analytical formula for the social discount rate allowing us to disentangle inequality, risk, and intertemporal fluctuation aversion.


2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 894-897

Explores recent advances in the field of the social discount rate and considers how society should value the future in this context. Discusses three ways to determine the discount rate; the Ramsey rule; extending the Ramsey rule to an uncertain economic growth; random walk and mean-reversion; Markov switches and extreme events; parametric uncertainty and fat tails; the Weitzman argument; a theory of the decreasing term structure of discount rates; inequalities; discounting nonmonetary benefits; alternative decision criteria; evaluation of risky projects; the option value of uncertain projects; and evaluation of nonmarginal projects. Gollier is Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse and Director of the Toulouse School of Economics.


Author(s):  
Christian Gollier

This chapter considers the prospect of uncertainty in planning for the future. In fact, it is commonly accepted that individuals are ready to sacrifice more in the present for the future when this future becomes more uncertain. Keynes was the first to mention this idea by pointing out the precautionary motive for saving. What is desirable at the individual level is also desirable at the collective one. Thus the chapter argues that a society that wants to reinforce the incentive to invest for the future because of its uncertain nature should select a smaller discount rate to evaluate the set of all possible investment projects.


Author(s):  
Christian Gollier

This chapter presents the main argument in favor of a positive discount rate. In a growing economy, future generations will consume more goods and services than we do. In this context, investing for the future is equivalent to asking poor consumers to sacrifice more of their consumption for the benefit for wealthier people. Because of inequality aversion, one would be ready to do so only if the rate of return of these investment projects is large enough to compensate for the increased intertemporal inequalities that these projects would generate. The Ramsey rule quantifies this wealth effect. In fact, several experts have used the Ramsey rule to make recommendations on the choice of the discount rate to evaluate public policies, in particular toward climate change.


2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yun Zhang ◽  
Min Yu ◽  
Xinyue Zhou ◽  
Jingjing Lin ◽  
Yi Ni

EDIS ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Singerman ◽  
Marina Burani Arouca ◽  
Mercy A. Olmstead

The article summarizes the establishment and production costs, as well as the potential profitability of a peach orchard in Florida. Our findings show the initial investment required for a peach operation in Florida to be $6,457 per acre; the expense in land preparation and planting alone in year 1 is $2,541 per acre. Variable and fixed costs in years 2 through 15 average $5,680 per acre. As an example of profitability, when using a 10% discount rate, an operation yielding 6,525 (7,254) pounds of marketable fruit per acre during its most productive years obtains a positive NPV when the average price is $2.38 ($2.13) per pound.


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