The nature of discounting

Jing Chen ()

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2012, vol. 23, issue 3, 313-324

Abstract: From monetary policies to the climate change problem, from the burden of private credit card debts to the evaluation of public projects, discount rate is the central issue, yet there is little clear understanding about the nature of discounting. In this paper, applying a newly developed production theory, we discuss how discount rate is related to other factors in social systems, such as risk, duration of production, fixed cost in production and market size. The relations among different factors in a social system put constraints on the ranges of discount rate that are viable in particular environments. Our findings have strong policy implications. In a world of increasing cost of extracting natural resources, the continuation of low discount rate policy will generate wide gyration of social systems that we have witnessed in recent years.

Keywords: Discounting; Risk; Fixed cost; Monetary policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X12000379
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:streco:v:23:y:2012:i:3:p:313-324

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2012.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen

More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().