Risk management and wealth accumulation behavior in France

Recent theoretical saving models have placed greater emphasis on studying prudent behavior in the face of an uncertain future and have shown the influences of background risks on precautionary savings: a prudent household exposed to a high future income risk will increase its savings. Empirical tests on recent French data (‘INSEE Patrimoine 97’) show the relevance of subjective earnings variance to explain wealth accumulation but its contribution is not very large (around 5%).