This project analyzes how life investments affect the financial wealth of French households.
In existing work, the authors have shown that the largest type of life insurance products (euro contracts) implements risk sharing across investor cohorts. We estimate that approximately 0.8% of GDP is redistributed across investor cohorts every year.
To estimate the importance of this redistribution, one must compare these quantities to the total financial wealth of individual investors. Using data on households' financial wealth and investments, this project proposes a study of the effects of cross-cohort risk sharing through life insurance on investors' total wealth. Besides, the household-level data should allow us to map cross-cohort risk sharing into intergenerational risk sharing between different generations of households in the demographic sense.
