Wealth accumulation over the life-cycle: some evidence for France

Beffy Magali, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE)
Carole Bonnet, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

The aim of this paper is to study life-cycle accumulation in the French case. In a context of decreasing replacement rates due to pension reforms, individual saving takes a greater importance to cover expenditures during retirement. Besides, accumulated wealth should enter the behaviour model of retirement to better understand how people react to pension reforms. In the absence of available panel data, we use repeated cross-sections of the French Household Wealth Surveys (1986, 1991, 1997, 2003) to construct synthetic cohorts and to estimate life cycle profiles of wealth, controlling for cohort and time effects Age Period Cohort decomposition). We highlight that household do not seem to decumulate at older ages and that cohort effects seem to be slightly declining for the youngest cohorts.