Christian Gollier – författare

For all of their focus on asset prices, financial economists rarely ask if assets are priced ethically-that is, if their prices are compatible with the public good. Yet in a world facing major, possibly catastrophic problems-global warming, for instance, and growing inequality-it is now more important than ever that we allocate capital to projects that will benefit society as a whole, not just today but far into the future. In this book, Christian Gollier develops a powerful method for transforming our societal goals of collective prosperity into the cornerstone of our financial decision making. Ethical Asset Valuation and the Good Society starts by stating transparent moral principles and, from these, derives simple rules that can be used to evaluate saving and investment decisions in terms of the public good. Rather than trying to explain observed asset prices, Gollier derives what these prices ought to be in order to direct capital toward socially desirable investments. He focuses especially on the two prices that drive most financial decisions-the price of time as reflected in the interest rate and the price of risk-and explores the role these play in our long-term planning.If investment projects in renewable energy could be financed at a lower interest rate than those linked to fossil fuels, for instance, the energy transition would be easier to accomplish. Building on criticism of the short-term thinking of financial markets, Gollier suggests ways to shift investment toward the future through the discounting of the valuation of assets and investments with long-term benefits. In this sophisticated but accessible work, Gollier builds a bridge between welfare economics and finance theory to provide a framework for ethical valuation capable of establishing what asset prices should be on the basis of our shared moral values.

An understanding of risk and how to deal with it is an essential part of modern economics. Whether liability litigation for pharmaceutical firms or an individual's having insufficient wealth to retire, risk is something that can be recognized, quantified, analyzed, treated--and incorporated into our decision-making processes. This book represents a concise summary of basic multiperiod decision-making under risk. Its detailed coverage of a broad range of topics is ideally suited for use in advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate courses either as a self-contained text, or the introductory chapters combined with a selection of later chapters can represent core reading in courses on macroeconomics, insurance, portfolio choice, or asset pricing. The authors start with the fundamentals of risk measurement and risk aversion. They then apply these concepts to insurance decisions and portfolio choice in a one-period model. After examining these decisions in their one-period setting, they devote most of the book to a multiperiod context, which adds the long-term perspective most risk management analyses require.Each chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevant literature and a set of problems. The book presents a thoroughly accessible introduction to risk, bridging the gap between the traditionally separate economics and finance literatures.

Our path of economic development has generated a growing list of environmental problems including the disposal of nuclear waste, exhaustion of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and polluted land, air, and water. All these environmental problems raise the crucial challenge of determining what we should and should not do for future generations. It is also central to other policy debates, including, for example, the appropriate level of public debt, investment in public infrastructure, investment in education, and the level of funding for pension benefits and for research and development. Today, the judge, the citizen, the politician, and the entrepreneur are concerned with the sustainability of our development. The objective of Pricing the Planet's Future is to provide a simple framework to organize the debate on what we should do for the future. A key element of analysis by economists is the discount rate--the minimum rate of return required from an investment project to make it desirable to implement. Christian Gollier outlines the basic theory of the discount rate and the various arguments that favor using a smaller discount rate for more distant cash flows.With principles that can be applied to many policy areas, Pricing the Planet's Future offers an ideal framework for dynamic problems and decision making.

Expected utility provides simple, testable properties of the optimum behaviour that should be displayed by risk-averse individuals in risky decisions. Simultaneously, given the existence of paradoxes under the expected utility paradigm, expected utility can only be regarded as an approximation of actual behaviour. A more realistic model is needed. This is particularly true when treating attitudes toward small probability events: the standard situation for insurable risks. This book examines whether the existing results in insurance economics are robust to more general models of behaviour under risk.

This research review assesses the ground-breaking contributions to the evolution of knowledge in the economics of risk and time, from its early twentieth-century explorations to its current diversity of approaches. The analysis focuses first on the basic decisions under uncertainty, and then on asset pricing. It further discusses both classical expected utility approach and its non-expected utility generalizations, with applications to dynamic portfolio choices, insurance, risk sharing, and risk prevention. This review will be valuable for scholars in finance and macroeconomics, particularly those with an interest in the modeling foundations of consumer and investor decisions under uncertainty.