This paper is about “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” by Thomas Piketty. It identifies his central macroeconomic claims and examines them, arguing that the contentions are theoretically and empirically unwarranted.

This contribution analyzes the personal income distribution with the actual microdata of the German Income Tax Statistics and focus on top incomes for important labour market groups: the self-employed (as freelancers and entrepreneurs) and employees. New are the first longitudinal results based...