Pricing the Planet's Future : : The Economics of Discounting in an Uncertain World / / Christian Gollier.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Gollier, Christian,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2012]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.) :; 27 line illus. 10 tables.

Our path of economic development has generated a growing list of environmental problems including the disposal of nuclear waste, exhaustion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and polluted land, air, and water. All these environmental problems raise the crucial challenge of determining what we should and should not do for future generations. It is also central to other policy debates, including, for example, the appropriate level of public debt, investment in public infrastructure, investment in education, and the level of funding for pension benefits and for research and development. Today, the judge, the citizen, the politician, and the entrepreneur are concerned with the sustainability of our development. The objective of Pricing the Planet's Future is to provide a simple framework to organize the debate on what we should do for the future. A key element of analysis by economists is the discount rate--the minimum rate of return required from an investment project to make it desirable to implement. Christian Gollier outlines the basic theory of the discount rate and the various arguments that favor using a smaller discount rate for more distant cash flows. With principles that can be applied to many policy areas, Pricing the Planet's Future offers an ideal framework for dynamic problems and decision making.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part I: The Simple Economics of Discounting -- 1. Three Ways to Determine the Discount Rate -- 2. The Ramsey Rule -- 3. Extending the Ramsey Rule to an Uncertain Economic Growth -- Part II: The Term Structure of Discount Rates -- 4. Random Walk and Mean-Reversion -- 5. Markov Switches and Extreme Events -- 6. Parametric Uncertainty and Fat Tails -- 7. The Weitzman Argument -- 8. A Theory of the Decreasing Term Structure of Discount Rates -- Part III: Extensions -- 9. Inequalities -- 10. Discounting Non-monetary Benefits -- 11. Alternative Decision Criteria -- Part IV: Evaluation of Risky and Uncertain Projects -- 12. Evaluation of Risky Projects -- 13. The Option Value of Uncertain Projects -- 14. Evaluation of Non-marginal Projects -- Global Conclusion -- Index