We compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of univariate homoskedastic, GARCH, autoregressive and nonparametric models for conditional variances, using five bilateral weekly exchange rates for the dollar, 1973-1989. For a one week horizon, GARCH models tend to make slightly more...

When estimates of variances are used to make asset allocation decisions, underestimates of population variances lead to lower expected utility than equivalent overestimates: a utility based criterion is asymmetric, unlike standard criteria such as mean squared error. To illustrate how to...