Discounting Disentangled

Moritz Drupp, Mark C. Freeman, Ben Groom and Frikk Nesje

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2018, vol. 10, issue 4, 109-34

Abstract: 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-codes: C83 D61 D82 H43 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20160240
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (127)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Discounting disentangled (2018)
Working Paper: Discounting Disentangled (2015)
Working Paper: Discounting disentangled (2015)
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