Measuring savers' preferences: how and why (in times of crisis)?

Summary With its five waves from 1998 to 2011, which include a strong panel dimension, the Pater data corpus provides complementary information to INSEE's wealth surveys on more subjective and qualitative aspects of wealth behavior. Each questionnaire includes a series of preference measures obtained using different methods. In addition to the "usual" measures proposed by the empirical literature, they are derived from an original approach, based on a scoring procedure developed in 1998 and perfected since then: questions covering various areas of life make it possible to evaluate ordinal, synthetic and coherent indicators concerning the attitudes of each respondent towards risk and uncertainty, his or her degree of family altruism and the priority he or she gives to the present. The data lead us to retain in each of the five waves only one "score" for risk and one for altruism, but to distinguish two distinct scores for the priority given to the present: the degree of impatience in the short term and the time preference in the long term. In addition to this robust result, our method appears to be superior to other preference measures in terms of the statistical properties and explanatory factors of the four identified scores, as well as in terms of the correlations between these different scores or their effects on wealth and asset demands. Allowing the same savers to be tracked during the crisis, the Pater data, like other sources, show that the French are less inclined to take risks in their savings or their portfolio choices. However, this change in behavior is not explained by a change in savers' preferences, which have remained statistically stable since June 2007, but rather by increasingly gloomy expectations regarding the return and risk of financial assets.