This paper establishes a nexus between the established fields of constitutional political economy and macroeconomic capital theory. Constitutional political economy explores how legal and institutional structures emerge over time. The evolution of property rights has always been a central focus of this line of inquiry. Time preference is one of the most basic economic concepts. Theories of inte...

We examine the evolutionary foundations of intertemporal preferences. When all the risk affecting survival and reproduction is idiosyncratic, evolution selects for agents who maximize the discounted sum of expected utility, discounting at the sum of the population growth rate and the mortality rate. Aggregate uncertainty concerning survival rates leads to discount rates that exceed the sum of p...