Optimal Investment-Consumption Strategy in a Discrete-Time Model with Regime Switching

This paper analyzes the investment-consumption problem of a risk averse investor in discrete-time model. We assume that the return of a risky asset depends on the economic environments and that the economic environments are ranked and described using a Markov chain with an absorbing state which represents the bankruptcy state. We formulate the investor’s decision as an optimal stochastic control problem. We show that the optimal investment strategy is the same as that in Cheung and Yang (2004), and a closed form expression of the optimal consumption strategy has been obtained. In addition, we investigate the impact of economic environment regime on the optimal strategy. We employ some tools in stochastic orders to obtain the properties of the optimal strategy.