Le Produit d'Epargne Retraite Populaire (PERP) : caractéristiques des détenteurs et projection des niveaux de rentes

The French law called "Fillon Act", enacted on August 21st 2003, has created an individual saving contract called "PERP" (Plan d'Epargne Retraite) which objective is to supplement public pensions. It is a defined contribution scheme whith payments deductible from taxable income (up to 10% of the annual revenue). At retirement, benefits are paid in the form of annuities and taxed at a normal rate. We use a large dataset on saving behaviour of 9880 households in order to ascertain the profile by age, socio-economic status, levels of income, levels of wealth, and fiscal status of holders of at least one PERP. We show that this saving product has spread evenly in all socio-economic status and that the participation rate is most important for households whose head is 25-34 year old or 50-54 year old. We use simulated residuals to simulate continuous distribution of the PERP wealth and contributions, using bracket information available in our dataset. This allows us to project the future growth of assets in personal retirement plans until age 60 and to estimate the level of annuity that households will obtain after retirement. We find that most households are likely to benefit from a very small annuity, which is less than 1% of their last earning before the conversion of their plan.