US Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman described Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century as "perhaps the most important book of the last decade". It has sparked major international debates, dominated bestseller lists and generated a level of enthusiasm -- as well as intense criticism --...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...