scholarly journals The Entrepreneurial Social Discount Rate: Risk Premium and Loss Aversion in New Ventures

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
David Ceballos Hornero ◽  
Samuel Mongrut Montalván

We derive a mathematical extension of the social discount rate (SDR) in such a way that we can valuate intergenerational startups financed with personal and government funds at the aggregate level. The results imply that the precise determination of the SDR can change the financial priority of investment. Therefore, we recommend government officials to include factors of economic growth (wealth effect), intergenerational prevention (precautionary effect), loss aversion, and the specific risk of the business in the valuation of new ventures and in the estimation of the social discount rate to be more representative of the social utility. Our contribution lies in including a risk premium from the firm’s average non-systematic risk and the loss aversion of a representative investor in estimating the SDR.

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)


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Burgess ◽  
Richard O. Zerbe

In order to be sensible about what discount rate to use one must be clear about its purpose. We suggest that its purpose is to help select those projects that will contribute more net benefits than some other discount rate. This approach, which is after all the foundation for benefit-cost analysis, helps to reconcile different suggested procedures for determining the discount rate. We suggest that the social opportunity cost of capital (SOC) is superior to other suggested approaches in its generality and its ease of use. We use the SOC to determine a range of real rates that vary between 6% and 8%. We suggest that approaches based on determination of preferences, which result in hyperbolic discounting, are less appropriate and less useful.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arian Daneshmand ◽  
Esfandiar Jahangard ◽  
Mahnoush Abdollah-Milani

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
TYLER COWEN ◽  
DEREK PARFIT

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.


2004 ◽  
Vol 112 (6) ◽  
pp. 1257-1268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Caplin ◽  
John Leahy

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