Dynamic Mean-Variance Asset Allocation
Toronto and University of Warwick for helpful comments. All errors are our responsibility. Dynamic Mean-Variance Asset Allocation Mean-variance criteria remain prevalent in multi-period problems, and yet not much is known about their dynamically optimal policies. We provide a fully analytical characterization of the optimal dynamic mean-variance portfolios within a general incomplete-market economy, and recover a simple structure that also inherits several conventional properties of static models. We also identify a probability measure that incorporates intertemporal hedging demands and facilitates much tractability in the explicit computation of portfolios. We solve the problem by explicitly recognizing the time-inconsistency of the mean-variance criterion and deriving a recursive representation for it, which makes dynamic programming applicable. We further show that our time-consistent solution is generically different from the pre-commitment solutions in the extant literature, which maximize the mean-variance criterion at an initial date and which the investor commits to follow despite incentives to deviate. We illustrate the usefulness of our analysis by explicitly computing dynamic mean-variance portfolios under various stochastic investment opportunities in a straightforward way, which does not involve solving a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman
- DOI
- 10.1093/rfs/hhq028
- Volume
- 23 (8)
- Pages
- 2970-3016
- Language
- en
- Export
- BibTeX
- Sources
- openalex crossref