This essay is a comprehensive and critical review of Thomas Piketty s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It follows the flow of Piketty s argument carefully and literally and notes his many assertions that are unsupported or contradicted by economic logic and empirical evidence, particularly...

The fact that most eldealy individuals in the United States choose to maintain a flat age-wealth profile, rather than buy individual life annuities, stands in contrast to central implications of the standard life-cycle model of consumption-saving behavior. The analysis in this paper lends...

This paper presents a calculation of the time series of the after-tax rate of return to whole life insurancy. When compared to the after-tax return on an alternative portfolio of similar risk, more than 60%of the decline in life insurance savings (suitably defined) in the past two decades can be...