The Weitzman Premium on the Social Cost of Carbon

Jinchi Dong, Richard Tol and Fangzhi Wang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Preference heterogeneity massively increases the social cost of carbon. We call this the Weitzman premium. Uncertainty about an exponential discount rate implies a hyperbolic discount rate, which in the near term is equal to the average discount rate but in the long term falls to the minimum discount rate. We calibrate the pure rate of time preference and the inverse of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution of 79,273 individuals from 76 countries and compute the corresponding social cost of carbon. Compared to the social cost of carbon for average time preferences, the average social cost of carbon is 6 times as large in the base calibration, and up to 200 times as large in sensitivity analyses.

Date: 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01394 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2502.01394

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().