The European Commission, with the help of several consultants and JASPERS, prepared an updated Guide to Cost-Benefit Analysis, that is compulsory for all major projects submitted to ESIF 2014-2020. The CBA guide builds on a vast experience gained in the preparation and appraisal of major projects in the programming period 2007-2013. It aims to provide practical recommendations and case studies for the authorities involved in major projects and for all the consultants preparing the project documentation.

The research project aimed at developing and testing a model for evaluating Big Science. The developed model will enable funding agencies to assess the potential future net social benefits generated by a research infrastructure and the uncertainty and risks associated to it.

The project built on the international practice and produced a cost/benefit analysis (CBA) model for decision making able to assess the potential future net social benefits generated by a research infrastructure and the uncertainty and risks associated to them.

The analytical framework will adapt the standard CBA model to the specificities of research infrastructures, which pose a number of methodological challenges, namely:

• Intangible nature of benefits
• Long time span of benefits to occur
• Uncertainty and risk
• Spillovers and externalities

The project has been financed by the European Investment Bank Institute (EIB Institute) in the frame of its EIB University Research Sponsorship Programme (EIBURS), which provides grants to EU University Research Centres working on research topics and themes of major interest to the Bank.

Social cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of projects has been successfully applied in different fields such as transport, energy, health, education, and environment, climate change policy, but often considered impossible for research infrastructures because of the impredictable benefits of scientific discovery. We have designed a CBA model for large scale research infrastructures and applied it to the LHC. After estimating investment and operation costs spread over 30 years (to 2025), combining data from the CERN and the experiments, we evaluate the benefits of knowledge output (publications), human capital development, technological spillovers, and cultural effects. Additionally, willingness-to-pay for the pure value of discovery at the LHC by the general public is estimated through a survey of around 1,ooo respondendents in four countries. Setting to zero any until now unpredictable economic value of discovery of the Higgs boson (or of any new physics), we compute a probability distribution for the net present value of the LHC through Monte Carlo simulation of 19 input, output and valuation variables and show that there is currently 92% probability that social benefits of the LHC exceed its costs. The approach and the results shed light on the social net benefits of research infrastructures for the first time in an empirically testable form.