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How certain are we about the certainty-equivalent long term social discount rate?

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-07-04, 15:04 authored by Mark Freeman, Ben Groom
Theoretical arguments for using a term structure of social discount rates (SDR) that declines with the time horizon have influenced Government guidelines in the US and Europe. The certainty equivalent discount rate that often underpins this guidance embodies uncertainty in the primitives of the SDR, such as growth. For distant time horizons the probability distributions of these primitives are ambiguous and the certainty equivalent itself is uncertain. Yet, if a limited set of characteristics of the unknown probability distributions can be agreed upon, ‘sharp’ upper and lower bounds can be defined for the certainty-equivalent SDR. Unfortunately, even with considerable agreement on these features, these bounds are widely spread for horizons beyond 75 years. So while estimates of the present value of intergenerational impacts, including the social cost of carbon, can be bounded in the presence of this ambiguity, they typically remain so imprecise as to provide little practical guidance.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

Volume

79

Pages

152 - 168

Citation

FREEMAN, M. and GROOM, B., 2016. How certain are we about the certainty-equivalent long term social discount rate? Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 79, pp. 152-168.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-06-22

Publication date

2016-07-02

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2016.06.004.

ISSN

0095-0696

eISSN

1096-0449

Language

  • en