Data & Code for: Non-dogmatic Social Discounting

This repository contains the Matlab code and data used to plot the figures in "Non-dogmatic social discounting". There are three files:

a) “Drupp_data.xlsx” — data provided by the authors of Drupp et. al. (2018). The original paper contains a code book, available at https://aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20160240.data

b) "deltaeta_data.mat" -- a Matlab data file containing the surveyed values of "delta" (pure rate of social time preference) and "eta" (elasticity of marginal utility), reported in the Excel file above.

c) "NDSD.m" -- a Matlab script that plots the figures displayed in the paper, and the online appendix. (Depends on deltaeta_data.mat)

To replicate the figures, place “NDSD.m” and “deltaeta_data.mat” in the same folder, and execute NDSD.m from the Matlab command line.

The paper's abstract is as follows:

The long-run social discount rate has an enormous effect on the value of climate mitigation, infrastructure projects, and other long-term public policies. Its value is however highly contested, in part because of normative disagreements about social time preferences. I develop a theory of `non-dogmatic' social planners, who are insecure in their current normative judgments and entertain the possibility that they may change. Although each non-dogmatic planner advocates an idiosyncratic theory of intertemporal social welfare, all such planners agree on the long-run social discount rate. Non-dogmatism thus goes some way towards resolving normative disagreements, especially for long-term public projects.