Exchange Rate Predictability in Finite Samples

The goal of the present study is to re-examine the exchange rate predictability with an approach that accounts for the negative effect of the finite-sample estimation error on forecast accuracy in the in-sample test. We consider various exchange rate models and find that despite the presence of significant population-level predictive content in the exchange rate model, the coefficients of the predictive variables could be small enough that, with the available sample, they are estimated so imprecisely that a random walk model can be expected to forecast at least as well as the exchange rate model.