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Abstract
It has been argued from a number of perspectives that the discount rate
might decline with increasing period of discounting. With a stepped profile
of decline, financially optimal rotations are quite likely to occur at a few
discrete ages. For any form of declining discount rate, successor rotations
will lengthen, and this will affect the optimal length of earlier rotations. But
if rotation length is reassessed periodically, successor rotations will be
adjusted downwards from those deemed optimal by a prior generation – a
standard problem of dynamic inconsistency. This adjusted sequence of
rotations will be deemed by the original decision makers to be less valuable
than a sequence of lengthening rotations, and this may affect their own
choice of optimal rotation. Whether, and how much, adjustment is
appropriate, depends on the reasons underlying the decline of discount rates.