Uwe Thuemmel

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Uwe Thuemmel is an economist whose research sits at the intersection of public finance, optimal taxation, and the economics of automation. His most significant contribution centers on the optimal taxation of robots and artificial intelligence — a timely and policy-relevant question as automation increasingly reshapes labor markets. In his influential work "Optimal Taxation of Robots," which has garnered over 80 citations across its 2018 and 2022 iterations, Thuemmel demonstrates a theoretically elegant and counterintuitive result: that distorting robot adoption through targeted taxation can be welfare-improving. The key mechanism he identifies is that robot taxes exploit general-equilibrium effects to compress the wage distribution, which in turn reduces the distortionary costs of labor income taxation — ultimately raising overall social welfare. This insight bridges classical optimal tax theory with the modern challenge of technological displacement, offering policymakers a rigorous framework for thinking about how to respond to automation. Thuemmel's work has attracted considerable attention from both academic economists and policy circles, establishing him as an emerging voice in debates over how tax systems should adapt to a rapidly automating economy.