scholarly journals Comment on Burgess and Zerbe: On Bank Market Power and the Social Discount Rate

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per-Olov Johansson ◽  
Bengt Kriström

In this note we discuss how to estimate the social discount rate when banks have market power. Some data from Sweden are used to illustrate the approach. If other investments are crowded out, the implied social discount rate is around 7 percent, i.e. more or less equal to the one suggested by Burgess and Zerbe (2011) for the U.S. but similar to those often used in the EU (3-4 percent) if private consumption is crowded out by the considered investment.

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.


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)


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):  
Oliver Gerstenberg

At a first glance, to many observers the EU may appear to be an improbable illustration of the possibility of an extension of legitimacy and democratic justice beyond the state. In contemporary European constitutional debate constitutionalism and social democracy have become antagonists, with the survival of the one seeming to require sacrifice of the other. Authors in the tradition of ordoliberalism have celebrated the Europeanization process because it seemed to ultimately disconnect constitutionalism from democratic practice and to firmly entrench a logic of market evolution that marginalizes politics. Social democrats, by contrast, have come to believe that democracy can only flourish if the solidary politics of the nation retains its sovereignty against cosmopolitan, ‘constitutional’ intrusions from without. Proposals to deepen constitutional integration therefore give rise to the social-democratic objection. This chapter offers a stylized account of both views, which more or less mirror one another. This chapter then also provides an in-depth analysis of the CJEU’s jurisprudence in various domains regarding the efficacy of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (CFREU) in European private law: employment law and unfair terms in consumer contracts in particular. The chapter concludes that, contrary to expectations and concerns about a constitutional asymmetry between economic freedoms and fundamental social rights, the CJEU has in fact in many cases raised the standard of protection beyond the standard envisaged by national legal orders, thereby unblocking development.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-420
Author(s):  
Catherine Jacqueson

Free movement should in theory enable individuals to fight poverty at home by finding employment in another Member State. Yet, free movement is not always that easy and can in practice lead to social dumping in specific sectors where posted workers ultimately push salaries to the bottom. Such a race to the bottom might also arise outside a free movement context when workers are falsely qualified as self-employed thus undercutting wages. This article argues that EU economic law both creates risks of social dumping and remedies them. It calls for a rebalancing of the liberal ethos of the principle of free movement and competition law on the one hand, and the social objectives of the EU, on the other hand. A key question is whether it is possible to redress the balance between the economic and the social from within the internal market logic or whether the social push has to come from outside.


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

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