The microsimulation model Destinie developed at INSEE projects the evolution of a representative sample of the French population up to 2040. It thus proves very useful to assess the effect of pension schemes reforms in the private sector on participation behaviour and financial balances. The...

Most of the retirement decision models consider retirement as an individual trade-off between consumption and leisure and do not take the spouse situation into account. However, several elements could account for an interdependance between the spouses retirement decisions : complementarity for...

This paper proposes an indicator for detecting business cycle turning points involving mixed frequency business survey unbalanced data. It is based on a hidden Markov-switching model and allows for the detection of regime changes in a given economy where information is displayed monthly and/or...

We use the 1982 and 1993 reforms of the French pension system in the private sector to study the relationship between Social Security benefits and the well-being of the elderly between the late 70s and the beginning of the new century. Affecting people in a different way, depending on year of...

This paper analyses the intragenerational distributional impact of the French private sector pension scheme among workers born in the 1950s, using comparisons of the internal rates of return. We focus on the redistributive patterns according to the level of income, but also provide elements on...

The economic debate on pensions in France has been increasingly focusing on introducing more flexibility in the retirement decision (up to now sharply constrained by the strength of incentives to claim SS benefits at the so-called « full rate » in the private sector): see Charpin (1999) and...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the irreversibility of the retirement decision on labour supply after 60. According to the theory, when the retirement decision is an absorbing state, people tend to remain longer on the labour market to be able to benefit from changes in...

We model the demand for private annuities following Yaari (1965). In the line of Brown (1999) we define an Annuity Equivalent Wealth (AEW) that reflects the fact that an annuity provides a greater utility to a risk adverse individual than an actuarially equivalent lump sum. This indicator...

During the 2008/2009 crisis French businesses were hit by a slump in domestic and world demand, while French banks encountered difficulties that may have encouraged them to tighten their credit conditions. This crisis strongly affected the number of business start-ups as well as the initial size...

The French cluster policy Pôles de compétitivité has been launched in 2004 to foster collaborations between firms, research institutions, and training institutions. Many firms taking part in these clusters have obtained subsidies to finance R&D collaborative projects involving other firms and...