This paper discusses the central macroeconomic claims that are made in Thomas Piketty's book 'Capital in the Twenty-first Century'. The paper aims to show that Piketty's contentions are not only logically flawed but also contradicted by his own data.

This paper makes a fresh attempt at characterizing optimal commodity taxes. Under the usual assumptions, an extremely simple expression of second-best commodity taxes is derived, showing tax rates as functions of observable variables only, rather than as functions of unobservable variables such...

Effective from 2008, Germany's top marginal income tax rate rises from 42 to 45 per cent. However, sole proprietorships and partnerships can opt for a preferential tax rate of 28.25 per cent for retained profits (§ 34a EStG-E). If they do so, profits are taxed again upon distribution. Using...

The rational prodigality argument, which often serves to justify social security, is considered in a second-best tax framework with endogenous labor supply. Rational prodigality renders the familiar policies time inconsistent. We analyze time consistent policies and show that a wage tax suffices...

According to a widely held belief, all who are able to work, should work . We consider this statement within a framework of non-linear taxation. The crucial differ-ence between our model and the standard model is that the government can distinguish between productive persons and the disabled. A...

The paper presents an axiomatic restatement of the standard approach to nonlinear income taxation. It assumes a finite number of taxpayers rather than an uncountable infinity. Analytical tools are developed which facilitate proving the existence of tax schedules that are continuous,...

Previous studies have shown that the optimal marginal tax rate at the bottom of the income distribution may be positive, negative, or even zero. This paper reexamines this problem in a unified framework and tries to evaluate the arguments. It turns out that the case for positive marginal tax...

In recent contributions, Weizsäcker (2014) and Summers (2014) maintain that mature economies accumulate too much capital. They suggest large and lasting public deficits as a remedy. This paper argues that overaccumulation cannot occur in an economy with land. It presents novel data of aggregate...

This is a postprint of a paper that was published in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 146, 1990, pp. 640-647

This is a postprint of a paper that was published 1997 in H. Giersch (Ed.) Reforming the Welfare State. Berlin: Springer-Verlag