A tenet of green accounting, based on study of Harold Hotelling’s famous resource paper, is that capital gains do not constitute a part of a producer’s income. In canonical, “Hotelling” models of resource economics, however, two principles fundamental to Hotelling’s paper on accounting imply that capital gains are a part of income. A third principle implies that accounting should be at the most micro level possible, both to avoid aggregation bias and to reveal crucial adjustments for assets that do not have market prices.
Speakers: Robert Cairns
Robert Cairns has a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been at McGill since obtaining his doctorate. His work is mainly in non-renewable resource economics, the economic theory of sustainability, and the economics of accounting for resources and for sunk costs.