Publications

Social discounting and the cost of public funding in practice

Working paper by Michael Spackman on 28 Apr 2021

This paper is a contribution to the understanding and development of social discounting regimes. It addresses three implications of how public funding differs from private financing by debt and equity, then examines US Federal and United Kingdom central government conventions, and also illustrates the difficulties of establishing and maintaining analytically rigorous social discounting procedures in practice.



Social discounting: the SOC/STP divide

Working paper by Michael Spackman on 10 Feb 2017

More than 50 years of social discounting literature have not delivered satisfactory academic guidance to government practitioners. Users of the social opportunity cost (SOC) paradigm do not always appreciate that … read more »