The Ascent Of Market Efficiency

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.

This is the Black & White version of the book, available at a discount, which does not include the research data and analysis tables. There is also a Full Colour version that includes all the research data and analysis tables. What is a Stock Market? How do stock markets operate? Who invests in a stock market and when is it an appropriate tool for investment? Why do we care if a stock market is efficient or not? Where can we find evidence of market efficiency? With what tools can we test market efficiency?These are some of the questions that this book approaches. The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is a theory in financial economics, developed by Eugene Fama, which states that asset prices fully reflect all available information. Thus, it is implied that stocks always trade at their fair value, making it impossible for investors to "beat the market" via technical or fundamental analysis, since market prices should only react to new information.There are three variants of the EMH: "weak," "semi-strong," and "strong" form. The weak form of the EMH claims that prices already reflect all past publicly available market information. The semi-strong form claims that prices reflect all publicly available information, thus price changes occur to reflect new publicly available information. The strong form adds to this that prices instantly reflect even hidden private "insider" information.Testing the EMH is no easy task: Quantifying the availability of information and its effect on prices and market efficiency is challenging, making research on the subject difficult, time consuming and open to criticism. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that markets at best reach semi-strong form efficiency, with weak form efficiency being the norm. However, even this is challenged by the critics of EMH, via concepts such as Behavioural Finance.This book aims to familiarise the reader with the concept of EMH, covering the fundamentals and relevant literature. We then discuss market efficiency tests for Weak Form Market Efficiency, examining in more detail the day-of-the-week effect and its significance on stock market efficiency. The day-of-the-week effect is defined as a pattern where a certain day of the week has abnormal returns continuously. It is an anomaly that violates the random walk hypothesis, and thus implies that a market is not Weak Form efficient.We put theory into practice through the Empirical Research section which is divided into two parts, looking at two different approaches to researching the day-of-the-week effect, via the examination of actual research examples on a small European stock exchange. Both of these Thesis tested the hypothesis of random walk to determine the authenticity of weak form market efficiency for a small emerging stock market within the EU (the Cyprus Stock Exchange).

"Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are ration and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe - and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest. This is one of the biggest debates in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo cuts through this debate with a new framework, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, in which rationality and irrationality coexist. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, "Adaptive Markets" shows that the theory of marked efficiency isn't wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought - a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation."--Inside flap.

This book presents recent thought on market efficiency, using a complex systems approach to move past equilibrium models and quantify the actual efficiency of markets. The older view that markets are perfectly efficient has come under attack from several different directions, including studies of market anomalies, human psychology, bounded rationality, agent-based modeling, and evolutionary game theory. This volume brings together some of the best economists, physicists, and biologists working on quantitative models of complex, self-organized behavior relevant to measuring marketing efficiency, to stimulate new approaches to understanding financial markets.

At the end of the twentieth century it was thought by many that the Anglo-American system of corporate governance was performing effectively and some observers claimed to see an international trend towards convergence around this model. There can be no denying that the recent corporate governance crisis in the US has caused many to question their faith in this view. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive attempt to answer the following questions: firstly, what went wrong - when and why do markets misprice the value of firms, and what was wrong with the incentives set by Enron? Secondly, what has been done in response, and how well will it work - including essays on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, UK company law reform and European company law and auditor liability reform, along with a consideration of corporate governance reforms in historical perspective. Three approaches emerge. The first two share the premise that the system is fundamentally sound, but part ways over whether a regulatory response is required. The third view, in contrast, argues that the various scandals demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in the Anglo-American system itself, which cannot hope to be repaired by the sort of reforms that have taken place. "This collection of papers by leading US and European corporate law scholars provides fresh and rigorous analyses of the recent corporate governance scandals and the strategies devised by regulators to guard against future governance failures." Randall Thomas, John Beasley Professor of Law and Business, Vanderbilt University School of Law, Vanderbilt University.

The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency "[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post "Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens. The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.

China’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a market economy, the economic bureaucracy retained a striking degree of influence and control over crafting and implementing policy. Yet bureaucrats are often dismissed as faceless and inconsequential, their role neglected in favor of party leaders’ top-down rule or bottom-up initiatives. Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics offers a new account of economic policy making in China over the past four decades that reveals how bureaucrats have spurred large-scale transformations from within. Yingyao Wang demonstrates how competition among bureaucrats motivated by careerism has led to the emergence of new policy approaches. Second-tier economic bureaucrats instituted distinctive—and often conflicting—“policy paradigms” aimed at securing their standing and rewriting China’s long-term development plans for their own benefit. Emerging from the middle levels of the bureaucracy, these policy paradigms ultimately reorganized the Chinese economy and reshaped state-market relations. Drawing on fine-grained biographical and interview data, Wang traces how officials coalesced around shared career trajectories, generational experiences, and social networks to create new alliances and rivalries. Shedding new light on the making and trajectory of China’s ambitious economic reforms, this book also provides keen sociological insight into the relations among bureaucracy, states, and markets.