Overaccumulation, Public Debt, and the Importance of Land

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 land values, analyzes the issue within a stochastic framework, and conducts an empirical test of overaccumulation.