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Climate control needs have reached momentum. While scientists call for stabilizing climate and regulators structure climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts around the globe, economists are concerned with finding proper and fair financing mechanisms. In an overlapping-generations framework, Sachs (2014) solves the climate change predicament that seems to pit today’s against future generations. Sachs (2014) proposes that the current generation mitigates climate change financed through bonds to remain financially as well-off as without mitigation while improving environmental well-being of future generations through ensured climate stability. This intergenerational tax-and-transfer policy turns climate change mitigation into a Pareto improving strategy. Sachs’ (2014) discrete model is integrated in contemporary growth and resource theories. The following article analyzes how climate bonds can be phased-in, in a model for a socially optimal solution and a laissez-faire economy. Optimal trajectories are derived partially analytically (e.g., by using the Pontryagin maximum principle to define the optimal equilibrium), partially data driven (e.g., by the use of modern big market data), and partially by using novel cutting-edge methods – for example, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), which solves complex dynamic optimization problems with different nonlinearities for infinite and finite decision horizons. NMPC will be programed with terminal condition in order to determine appropriate numeric solutions converging to some optimal equilibria. The analysis tests if the climate change debt adjusted growth model stays within the bounds of a sustainable fiscal policy by employing NMPC, which solves complex dynamic systems with different nonlinearities.

Government agencies have endeavored, with limited success, to improve the methodological consistency of regulatory benefit–cost analysis (BCA). This paper recommends that an independent cohort of economists, policy analysts and legal scholars take on that task. Independently established “best practices” would have four positive effects: (1) they would render BCAs more regular in form and format and, thus, more readily assessable and replicable by social scientists; (2) improved consistency might marginally reduce political opposition to BCA as a policy tool; (3) politically-motivated, inter-agency methodological disputes might be avoided; and (4) an independent set of “best practices” would provide a sound, independent basis for judicial review of agency BCAs.

This chapter conducts a systematic comparison of behavioral economics’s challenges to the standard accounts of economic behaviors within three dimensions: under risk, over time, and regarding other people. A new perspective on two underlying methodological issues, i.e., inter-disciplinarity and the positive/normative distinction, is proposed by following the entanglement thesis of Hilary Putnam, Vivian Walsh, and Amartya Sen. This thesis holds that facts, values, and conventions have inter-dependent meanings in science which can be understood by scrutinizing formal and ordinary language uses. The goal is to provide a broad and self-contained picture of how behavioral economics is changing the mainstream of economics.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

The “time value of money principle,” a building block of finance theory and practice, states that money today is worth more than money in the future. In this chapter, we argue that this principle is not consistent with intergenerational equity or sustainability.

We demonstrate that standard capital budgeting negatively affects sustainability by presenting two numerical examples and by discussing the role of financial markets in the time value of money and the discount rate. We then discuss Silvio Gesell’s (1862–1930) concept of Freigeld as a possible alternative framework for a “socially optimal” discount rate.

We show that the time value of money principle, as employed in standard capital budgeting techniques, tends to reject sustainable projects (that only break even in the long run) and accept unsustainable projects (that break even in the short term but entail significant long-term negative externalities). We find that fiat currencies offer interesting perspectives in the context of sustainability.

We show that money, interest rates and investment valuation techniques are not merely technical tools, but have important institutional, social, and political attributes. Taken together with current global demands for sustainability, this observation could justify a new research agenda seeking to redefine current capital budgeting techniques.

We stress that the “time value of money principle” should not be viewed as a technical tool, but rather, as a social and political construct. We argue that the principle needs to be reconsidered given the current global sustainability crisis.

The economics literature considers that externalities indicate a market failure, to which policy makers should respond by introducing optimal tax incentives and regulation. At the same time, the management studies literature has proposed a set of initiatives to align corporate governance with sustainability principles. This chapter examines an issue that concerns both these literatures, that is, the relationship between sustainability and the time value of money.