Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:50:40am WEST
External resources will be made available 30 min before a session starts. You may have to reload the page to access the resources.
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Growth, Environment and Discounting Location: B128 Session Chair: Anastasios Xepapadeas, University of Bologna | |
    | |
Experimental evidence for dual discounting of consumption and the environment 1: Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland; 2: Department of Economics, LEEP Institute, University of Exeter, United Kingdom To account for lower growth of non-market ecosystem services vis-à-vis market consumption goods, governments increasingly consider differentiated discount rates for public project appraisal. In lack of empirical evidence, they so far rely on ad-hoc assumptions for calibration. To fill this gap, we conduct a laboratory choice experiment to provide a first full specification of the canonical dual discounting model for consumption and the environment. We find that intertemporal inequality aversion is above unity for consumption, and below unity for ecosystem services. Importantly, we elicit cross-elasticities of marginal utility between the two goods for the first time, finding small positive values that imply a weak substitutability between market consumption and non-market ecosystem services. For recent growth projections, our estimates indicate that the social discount rate for the environment is around 1.5 percentage points lower than for consumption. While the latter is well approximated by the conventional simple Ramsey rule, substantial errors in the valuation of environmental costs and benefits will arise from guidelines that do not feature differentiated discount rates or adequate relative price adjustments. | |