There is a capital taxation puzzle in most developed countries. Since the 1960s, revenues from wealth transfer taxation have been especially low and decreasing as a percentage of GDP, even to the extent of disappearing in quite a number of cases; by contrast, lifetime wealth or capital taxation...

Measuring individual preferences of savers have two main motivations: to reduce the share of non-observed heterogeneity in explaining households' wealth behaviors, and to construct more accurate tests of the theories of savings and portfolio choices. For France, we have constructed a unique data...

For a sub-sample of French households of an Insee wealth survey, we obtain new and relative measures of 5 individual preference parameters : the risk "attitude" (aversion, prudence...), the rate of time depreciation over the life-cycle, the degree of short-term impatience, and the degrees of...

In an extended variant of the life-cycle hypothesis, saving behaviour is shown to depend crucially on the interaction between two preference parameters : γ, which represents risk attitudes (aversion, prudence...), and δ, the rate of time depreciation. Hence, the predictions of four specific...