Siblings, Not Triplets: Social Preferences for Risk, Inequality and Time in Discounting Climate Change [Dataset]

In this model, the elasticity of marginal utility simultaneously reflects preferences for intertemporal substitution, aversion to risk, and aversion to (spatial) inequality.

While these three concepts are necessarily identical in the standard model, this need not be so: well-known model s already enable risk to be separated from intertemporal substitution. Separating the three concepts might have important implications for the appropriate discount rate, and hence also for long-term policy. This paper investigates these issues in the context of climate-change economics, by surveying the attitudes of over 3000 people to risk, income inequality over space and income inequality over time.