I. Introduction

A recent survey by Brookshire, et. al., (2006) suggests that forensic economists are mixed in their use of current versus historical data to estimate future net discount rates.1 Typically the choice is between a long-term average or simply the current prevailing rate.2 Cushing and Rosenbaum (2006) proposed an estimator that optimally uses the information in the past behavior of net discount rates to forecast future rates. Their optimal estimator is a weighted average of the current and long-term mean net discount rates with weights that depend on the degree of persistence