ABSTRACT
The wave of structural reforms that took place in the French financial markets during the 1980s meant that the econometric work which focused on the financial decisions had to be reconsidered. The behaviour which had previously been observed (see, for instance, the METRIC model developed by INSEE, the French National Statistical Institute, in 1978-79) was expected to be revised. Many papers have studied the personal sector (Boutillier and Charpin, 1986; Artus and Bleuze, 1989; or Lantiéri and Rivière, 1989). Their main conclusion is that yields do indeed play a major part in financial decisions. But contrary to what the Tobin-Markowitz portfolio model suggests (Tobin, 1958), variances and covariances of returns cannot explain households’ asset demand.
