全球智库信息集成服务系统(G2TT): The Discount Rate for Public Policy over the Distant Future

G2TT

来源类型	Working Paper
规范类型	报告
DOI	10.3386/w25413
来源ID	Working Paper 25413
	The Discount Rate for Public Policy over the Distant Future
	Qingran Li; William A. Pizer
发表日期	2018-12-31
出版年	2018
语种	英语
摘要	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 of return paid by capital investment and the rate received by consumers. Previous work has shown this approach legitimately bounds the analysis—but only when future benefits accrue directly to consumers either in a two-period model or as a perpetuity. We generalize to consider arbitrary patterns of future benefits, accruing either directly to consumers or indirectly through future investment. We derive an expression for the appropriate discount rate and show that it converges to the consumption rate for benefits increasingly far into the future. More generally, the bounding rates depend on the temporal pattern of the undiscounted dollars. As an application, we estimate the appropriate discount rate for climate change damages from carbon dioxide, finding it lies in a narrow range (+/- 0.5 percent) around the consumer rate of interest.
主题	Microeconomics ; Welfare and Collective Choice ; Public Economics ; Public Goods ; Environmental and Resource Economics ; Environment
URL	https://www.nber.org/papers/w25413
来源智库	National Bureau of Economic Research (United States)
引用统计
资源类型	智库出版物
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/583087
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Qingran Li,William A. Pizer. The Discount Rate for Public Policy over the Distant Future. 2018.

条目包含的文件
文件名称/大小	资源类型	版本类型	开放类型	使用许可
w25413.pdf（1097KB）	智库出版物		限制开放	CC BY-NC-SA	浏览