Efficient Market Hypothesis

What are the central questions of economics and how do economists tackle them? This book aims to answer these questions in 100 essays, written by economists and selected from "The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics". It shows how economists deal with issues ranging from trade to taxation.

This is an excerpt from the 4-volume dictionary of economics, a reference book which aims to define the subject of economics today. 1300 subject entries in the complete work cover the broad themes of economic theory. This extract concentrates on finance.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) asserts that, at all times, the price of a security reflects all available information about its fundamental value. The implication of the EMH for investors is that, to the extent that speculative trading is costly, speculation must be a loser's game. Hence, under the EMH, a passive strategy is bound eventually to beat a strategy that uses active management, where active management is characterized as trading that seeks to exploit mispriced assets relative to a risk-adjusted benchmark. The EMH has been refined over the past several decades to reflect the realism of the marketplace, including costly information, transactions costs, financing, agency costs, and other real-world frictions. The most recent expressions of the EMH thus allow a role for arbitrageurs in the market who may profit from their comparative advantages. These advantages may include specialized knowledge, lower trading costs, low management fees or agency costs, and a financing structure that allows the arbitrageur to undertake trades with long verification periods. The actions of these arbitrageurs cause liquid securities markets to be generally fairly efficient with respect to information, despite some notable anomalies.

The Ascent of Market Efficiency weaves together historical narrative and quantitative bibliometric data to detail the path financial economists took in order to form one of the central theories of financial economics—the influential efficient-market hypothesis—which states that the behavior of financial markets is unpredictable. As the notorious quip goes, a blindfolded monkey would do better than a group of experts in selecting a portfolio of securities, simply by throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper. How did such a hypothesis come to be so influential in the field of financial economics? How did financial economists turn a lack of evidence about systematic patterns in the behavior of financial markets into a foundational approach to the study of finance? Each chapter in Simone Polillo's fascinating meld of economics, science, and sociology focuses on these questions, as well as on collaborative academic networks, and on the values and affects that kept the networks together as they struggled to define what the new field of financial economics should be about. In doing so, he introduces a new dimension—data analysis—to our understanding of the ways knowledge advances. There are patterns in the ways knowledge is produced, and The Ascent of Market Efficiency helps us make sense of these patterns by providing a general framework that can be applied equally to other social and human sciences.

Describes the lives, theories, and legacies of six great minds in finance who changed the way we look at financial markets and equilibrium. Bachelier, Samuelson, Fama, Ross, Tobin, and Shiller; proponents and critics of the market efficiency theories who redefined modern finance, creating the foundation on which all financial analysis rests.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.7, The FOM University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, language: English, abstract: Especially after the 90ies, where the stock markets raised enormously, many private investors joined the stock market and were blended by abnormal profits and neglected possible losses. The same behavior could be observed before the Financial Crisis became reality. But each endless raising stock market would finally collapse, because stock prices are randomly and only driven by relevant news. The adjustment to the news is quickly. This is the theoretical argumentation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which will be evaluated in this paper. The author gives an overview about the EMH by explaining the basic principles and its mathematical formulation. The practical part evaluated the EMH on selected examples, where the theory could only be partly approved.

As an emerging global phenomenon, Islamic economics and the financial system has expanded exponentially in recent decades. Many components of the industry are still unknown, but hopefully, the lack of awareness will soon be stilled. The Handbook of Research on Theory and Practice of Global Islamic Finance provides emerging research on the latest global Islamic economic practices. The content within this publication examines risk management, economic justice, and stock market analysis. It is designed for financiers, banking professionals, economists, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students interested in ideas centered on the development and practice of Islamic finance.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1 (A), University of Graz (Institute f r Industrial Economics), 99 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This Master Thesis gives an overview of the research into the efficient market hypothesis from its first days in the 1950s to the present. The discussion of theoretical models and concepts is being complemented by a review of relevant empirical evidence from international capital markets. The thesis is completed by a brief outlook on newer research venues, including models employing behavioural finance approaches.