Objective: To summarize results of studies that estimate the social costs of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug abuse in Russia. The purpose of these studies was to inform policymakers about the real economic burden of risky behaviors and to provide conditions for evidencebased and well-informed decision making in this area. Methods: The cost-of-illness method was applied to estimate the social...

The Stern Review reported a social cost of carbon of over $300/tC, calling for ambitious climate policy. We here conduct a systematic sensitivity analysis of this result on two crucial parameters: the rate of pure time preference, and the rate of risk aversion. We show that the social cost of carbon lies anywhere in between 0 and $120 000/tC. However, if we restrict these two parameters to matc...

If preferences or budgets are heterogeneous across people (as they clearly are), then individual costof-living indices are also heterogeneous. Thus, any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem which we call a ’common-scaling’social cost-of-living index (CS-SCOLI). In addition, we describe nonparametric methods for estimating...

I analyze the marginal value of reducing greenhouse gas emissions (the “social cost of carbon”) under uncertainty about warming, under uncertainty about how much warming reduces consumption, and under stochastic shocks to consumption growth. I theoretically demonstrate that each of these sources of uncertainty increases the social cost of carbon under conventional preferences. In a calibrated n...

Over the past ten years the significance of costs burdened by parties not engaged in the contractual agreement (social costs) is gaining growing acknowledgment by city planners, municipal administrators and the engineering community. For many years the trenchless technology industry promoted the consideration of social costs in the project planning process. A key obstacle for such consideration...