Global warming and hyperbolic discounting

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Karp, L
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2004.02.005
• 发表日期: 2005
• 页码: 261-282
• 关键词: stock pollutant; hyperbolic discounting; Global warming; time consistency

摘要

The use of a constant discount rate to study long-lived environmental problems such as global warming has two disadvantages: the prescribed policy is sensitive to the discount rate, and with moderate discount rates, large future damages have almost no effect on current decisions. Time-consistent quasi-hyperbolic discounting alleviates both of these modeling problems, and is a plausible description of how people think about the future. We analyze the time-consistent Markov Perfect equilibrium in a general model with a stock pollutant. The solution to the linear-quadratic specialization illustrates the role of hyperbolic discounting in a model of global warming. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.