Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The findings of this research confirm that the notion of descriptive efficiency has been developed as a populist concept in managerial discourse and is typically interpreted in simplistic, normative terms and thus has limited technical meaning in management praxis. Furthermore, the concept has been captured by uncritical, yet plausible, management commentators who have seemingly assumed that management efficiency will emerge from the adoption of their various prescriptions. The research will contribute to the general management literature through a cross-disciplinary critique and a re-interpretation of the notion of efficiency in management praxis. At a macro-level, the research advances the proposition that the notion of efficiency has become an ideological statement of support for any management intention, rather than a practical means to inform a range of management actions. A grounded theory of descriptive efficiency is proposed in order to explain the apparently unconscious application of laissez-faire and more contemporary principles of economics to management praxis and the wider management discipline without the support of a substantive elaboration of contemporary efficiency. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

 This thesis contains two pieces of empirical study on market efficiency. The first essay tests the semi-strong form of market efficiency in the U.S. We use sell-side analyst target prices as publically available information and test the performance of a mean-variance optimized portfolio which is based on the Treynor and Black model. We focus on constituents of S&P 500 index as our sample universe. During the period of beck-testing from 2004 to 2010, we find that the dynamically rebalanced portfolio beats the market in 6 out of 7 years and that the strategy generates significant risk-adjusted abnormal returns. In the second essay we study the post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD) phenomenon, a well-documented market anomaly, on the French stock market. Our empirical study devises a difference-in-difference policy experiment to test if trading activities by individual investors contribute to the magnitude of PEAD. We exploit a recent policy reform on the French stock market, which significantly increased speculative trading costs of individual investors and reduced their trading activities. The impact of reform is found twice as large on individual contrarian traders than momentum traders. Using a group of unaffected stocks to control for potential non-experimental factors, we find magnitude of PEAD dropped significantly after the reform in the experimented group but not in the experimented group but not in the control group. / published_or_final_version / Economics and Finance / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has had significant impact on the theory and practice of investments. However technical trading rules have continued to be used by practioners and have been the focus of many academic studies which have focused on equity, foreign exchange and futures markets. The scarcity of research into technical trading models for fixed income markets is astonishing considering the significant size and consequent investor importance of fixed income markets relative to other financial markets and the extensive application of technical trading models by market participants. This is one of the few studies that develops a technical trading model applicable to fixed income markets. Black (1986) defined Efficient Markets as a market where deviations from fundamental values were short lived and small in magnitude. Fundamental asset values are hard to calculate, but we are able to identify fundamental values for a set of Government Bonds on the principle that yield relativities between such bonds are quite stable except for 'deliberate' changes in trading behaviour. We find that the deviations from fundamental value are short lived and small in magnitude. We exploit deviations from fundamental value by Butterfly Trading strategies; Normal Butterfly trades earning returns from movements in yield curve slope and curvature and Arbitrage Butterfly trades earning returns from yield curve curvature only. After considering transaction costs, we achieve annualised returns of 120bps from our Normal Butterfly trades and 72 bps from our Arbitrage Butterfly trades. Consistent with the risk-return relationship for financial instruments, we find that the returns and the volatility of returns for Normal Butterfly trades are higher than the returns and volatility of returns for Arbitrage Butterfly trades. Normal Butterfly trades are exposed to yield curve slope changes whereas Arbitrage Butterfly trades are not, resulting in higher risk and higher returns for Normal Butterfly trades. This finding is consistent with the results obtained by Fabozzi, Martellini and Priaulet (2005).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wyoming, 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Apr. 1, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-41).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Claremont Graduate School, 1992. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves [272]-276).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Claremont Graduate School, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-227).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Economics." Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-140).

No description available.

Forecasting stock price movements is a notoriously difficult job. Were it not so, it would be easy to get richer. In this case, however, nobody would get poorer. But if nobody gets poorer, nobody will get richer. There are two ways to get out of this vicious circle. The first, and the more well-trodden, is the Efficient Market Theory (EMT), or: Everybody Understands Everything. The second is the Casino Market Theory (CMT), or: Nobody Understands Anything. This work is an attempt to bridge the gap between these two theories. In the first chapter the EMT is analysed in its fundamental constituents, while Chapter 2 contains a discussion of several empirical tests of the theory. Chapter 3 extends the EMT to incorporate variable risk premia and rational speculative bubbles and Chapter 4 presents the available empirical evidence on the extended model. The line of research based on the EMT paradigm is abandoned in Chapter 5, where the central principle of the EMT - the assumption of homogeneous investors with common priors - is investigated and challenged. The basis is there laid for an alternative view of the stock market game, which emphasises the conventional nature of investors' beliefs about future returns and is consistent with the view that stock market prices do not only reflect the fundamental value of underlying companies. In Chapter 6, the hypothesis that non fundamental information (in particular, past information) may have an influence on current stock prices is evaluated against monthly data relative to the US, UK, Japanese and Italian stock markets. Contrary to popular wisdom, we find that past information has a significant effect on current stock returns. Our evidence indicates that, as Keynes suggested in the General Theory, conventional beliefs play a crucial role in the stock market game.