A risk-averse US investor adjusts the shares of a portfolio of short-term nominal domestic and foreign assets to maximize expected utility. The optimal strategy is to respond immediately to all new information which arrives weekly. We calculate the expected utility foregone when the investor abandons the optimal strategy and instead optimizes less frequently. We also consider the cases where the investor ignores the covariance between returns sourced in different countries, and where the investor makes unsystematic mistakes when forming expectations of exchange rate changes. We demonstrate that the expected utility cost of sub-optimal behaviour is generally very small. Thus, for example, if investors adjust portfolio shares every three months, they incur an average expected utility loss equivalent to about 0.16% p.a. It is therefore plausible that slight opportunity costs of frequent optimization may outweigh the benefits. This result may help explain the failure of uncovered interest parity.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Paula Drew).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jeffrey A. Frankel & Richard Meese, 1987.
"Are Exchange Rates Excessively Variable?,"
NBER Chapters,
in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1987, Volume 2, pages 117-162
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!]