TY - JOUR AU - Giglio, Stefano AU - Maggiori, Matteo AU - Stroebel, Johannes TI - Very Long-Run Discount Rates JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 20133 PY - 2014 Y2 - May 2014 DO - 10.3386/w20133 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20133 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20133.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Stefano Giglio Yale School of Management 165 Whitney Avenue New Haven, CT 06520 Tel: 203/432-3373 E-Mail: stefano.giglio@yale.edu Matteo Maggiori Stanford University Graduate School of Business 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305 E-Mail: maggiori@stanford.edu Johannes Stroebel Stern School of Business New York University 44 West 4th Street New York, NY 10012 Tel: 650/888-3441 E-Mail: johannes.stroebel@nyu.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2014-09-24 AB - We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either leaseholds or freeholds. Leaseholds are temporary, pre-paid, and tradable ownership contracts with maturities between 99 and 999 years, while freeholds are perpetual ownership contracts. The difference between leasehold and freehold prices reflects the present value of perpetual rental income starting at leasehold expiry, and is thus informative about very long-run discount rates. We estimate the price discounts for varying leasehold maturities compared to freeholds and extremely long-run leaseholds via hedonic regressions using proprietary datasets of the universe of transactions in each country. Agents discount very long-run cash flows at low rates, assigning high present values to cash flows hundreds of years in the future. For example, 100-year leaseholds are valued at more than 10% less than otherwise identical freeholds, implying discount rates below 2.6% for 100-year claims. Given the riskiness of rents, this suggests that both long-run risk-free discount rates and long-run risk premia are low. We show how the estimated very long-run discount rates are informative for climate change policy. ER -