  We calculate the electron-energy loss spectrum and the optical conductivity
for NaV$_{2}$O$_{5}$ using the standard Lanczos algorithm. The vanadium ions in
NaV$_{2}$O$_{5}$ form a system of coupled ladders which can be described by a
quarter-filled extended Hubbard model. Since this system has a large unit cell,
one has to be very careful to avoid finite-size effects in the calculations. We
show this by performing exact diagonalization of different clusters with up to
16 sites. The calculated loss function for the extended Hubbard model shows
good agreement with experimental spectra. Furthermore, a qualitative
description of the optical conductivity is obtained with the same Hamiltonian,
and the same set of model parameters. The comparison with the experiment shows
that interladder hopping is of minor importance for a realistic description of
charge excitations in NaV$_{2}$O$_{5}$. We find that the character of the
excitations depends strongly on the direction of momentum transfer.
