Intergenerational Discounting and Inequality

Frikk Nesje, Paolo G. Piacquadio and Paolo Giovanni Piacquadio

No 11630, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study all theories of justice that disentangle ethical views on intergenerational discounting and intergenerational inequality. Each “modular” social welfare function is uniquely identified by a time-discounting function—capturing attitudes toward time—and an aggregator function— capturing attitudes toward inequality. Our axiomatic characterization identifies the properties and establishes the limits of disentangling discounting and inequality. Our theories include as special cases the most common welfare criteria adopted in the literature, while uncovering unexplored (and yet tractable) families of alternative criteria.

Keywords: intergenerational justice; discounting; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D30 D60 H43 I31 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11630.pdf (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:ces:ceswps:_11630

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().