Besley (1988) is one of the few exceptional articles containing non-welfarist optimal tax devices. Feehan(1990) reports an error in his first-best rules. The present note criticizes the fundamentals of Besley's second-best rules. These rules optimize the welfare or well-being of phantom agents...

We characterize a family of r-extended generalized Lorenz dominance quasi-orderings and a family of r-Gini welfare orderings, on the basis of two allegedly "incompatible" axioms for heterogeneous welfare comparisons (Ebert, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003, Shorrocks, 1995), but at the cost of either...

Besley (1988) is one of the few exceptional articles containing non-welfarist optimal tax devices. Feehan (1990) reports an error in his first-best rules. The present note argues that Besley's second-best rules optimize the welfare of phantom agents rather than the corrected welfare of real...

Besley (1988) is one of the few exceptional articles containing non-welfarist optimal tax devices. Feehan (1990) reports an error in his first-best rules. The present note argues that Besley's second-best rules optimize the welfare of phantom agents rather than the corrected welfare of real...