Retirement entitlements as a parent or spouse?  To what extent are French households aware of these benefits?

Carole Bonnet, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Destre Guillaume, Conseil d'Orientation des Retraites

The degree of knowledge of people’s retirement benefits and its implications both on their choice of retirement age and on savings behavior, are questions that emerged in the literature some twenty years ago. So far, the literature focused on people’s own rights, acquired on the basis of their own contributions. Another way to get pension benefits is as a spouse or as a parent. In France, they represent 20 % of total pension expenditures in 2006. This article has two objectives. The first one is to document the knowledge of the survivor’s pension and on caring credits and to analyse the characteristics of individuals with an erroneous understanding. The second part is devoted to people’s aspirations regarding the survivor's pension and the opportunity to compensate during retirement for career breaks linked to children. Because of the limited information available, we introduced specific questions in the French part of the Gender and Generation Survey (GGS). We use logit model, multinomial logit model and principal component analysis.