This authoritative collection presents seminal papers from leading academics charting recent developments in public finance. The two-volume set encompasses numerous sections including the public sector in a market economy, market imperfections, growth implications of public policies and...

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...