Introduction: Wealth and savings behavior, the contributions of the 2010 wealth survey.

Summary The publication of this special issue of Economics and Statistics on wealth comes at a time when the success of T. Piketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century, has reawakened the interest of the academic world and the general public in the theme of wealth accumulation and the challenge posed by the growth of wealth inequalities. The publication of this special issue is timely for another reason. The economic and financial crisis we have been experiencing since 2008 has not "spared" savers. It is therefore essential to study what has changed in their asset management behavior. Like its predecessors, published in 1996, 2005 and 2008 respectively, this fourth issue of Économie et Statistique, which is devoted entirely to the economic analysis of household wealth, contains several articles which, for the most part, are based on the data collected by the wealth surveys conducted by INSEE every six years since 1986. Like them, it intends to contribute to the economics of household wealth, understood as that part of the economic discipline that endeavors to describe the processes by which households accumulate (or decumulate) savings, and whose importance has become increasingly apparent over the past three decades.