Non-welfare economics and the well-being of phantom agents: an appeal to caution

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 rather than the corrected welfare of real existing agents in society.

On the reconciliation of efficiency and inequality aversion with heterogeneous populations: characterization results

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 completeness or separability.heterogeneous welfare comparisons, equivalent income functions.

Merit goods and phantom agents

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 existing agents in society.merit goods

On Comparing Heterogenous Populations: is there really a Conflict between the Pareto Criterion and Inequality Aversion?

The incompatibility between the Pareto indifference criterion and a concern for greater equality in living standards of heterogenous populations (see, amongst others, Ebert, 1995, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003 and Shorrocks, 1995) might come as a surprise, since both principles are reconcilable when people differ only in income (homogenous population). We present two families of welfare rankings --(i) single parameter extensions of the generalized Lorenz dominance rule and (ii) a subset of Weymark's (1981) generalized Ginis-- and show how and why these rules resolve the paradox.heterogeneity, welfare comparisons.