Do People Care About Future Generations? Derived Preferences from Happiness Data

Stefano Bartolini and Francesco Sarracino

Ecological Economics, 2018, vol. 143, issue C, 253-275

Abstract: The main approaches for computing very long-term discount rates – revealed and stated preferences – have limitations. We overcome previous shortcomings using derived preferences, i.e. we retrieve information on very long-term time preferences from happiness data and people's expectations about the living conditions of future generations. We account for possible endogeneity between expectations about the future and current well-being using 2SLS. We find that negative (positive) expectations about future generations have a very large negative (positive) impact on subjective well-being. This finding suggests that the very long-term discount rate is lower than implied by most traditional economic analyses.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; Long-term discount rate; Intergenerational equity; Sustainability; Discounting; Climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 D63 I31 Q51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916302622
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:143:y:2018:i:c:p:253-275

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.06.029

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().