Thursday, May 08, 2014

On the Value of Catastrophic Climate Change

The possibility of catastrophic risk means more stringent action required.  This is not a surprising conclusion but is the correct way to look at the discounting issue in my opinion.

Models-as-Usual for Unusual Risks? On the Value of Catastrophic Climate Change

Antoine Bommier (Chair for Integrative Risk Management and Economics - ETH Zurich)
Bruno Lanz (Center for International Environmental Studies - Graduate Institute Geneva) 
Stéphane Zuber (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - CNRS : UMR8174 - Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris) 

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00973491&r=env
 
We study the role of alternative intertemporal preference representations in a model of economic growth, stock pollutant and endogenous risk of catastrophic collapse. We contrast the traditional "discounted utility" model, which assumes risk neutrality with respect to intertemporal utility, with a multiplicative choice model that displays risk aversion in that dimension. First, we show that both representations of preferences can rationalize the same "business as usual" economy for a given interest rate and no pollution externality. Second, once we introduce a collapse risk whose hazard rate is a function of the pollution stock, multiplicative preferences recommend a much more stringent policy response. An illustration in the context of climate change indicates that switching to the multiplicative preference representation has a similar effect, in terms of policy recommendations, as scaling up the schedule of the hazard rate by a factor of 100.












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