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There's nothing like financial Armageddon for reviving the work of an old economist. Amid the recessionary doom and gloom, the world has channeled Adam Smith, dusted off John Maynard Keynes and revisited Eugene Fama. In recent days, it's been James Tobin's turn. Close to four decades since the Yale economist proposed a levy on foreign-exchange transactions - or a "Tobin tax," as the suggestion became known - the idea is enjoying a new lease of life. At a meeting of G-20 finance ministers last weekend, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested the group of leading countries consider...
Their evidence? Mutual-fund managers failed as a group to outsmart the market, and studies showed that new information was quickly incorporated into prices. Eugene Fama, a young professor at Chicago's business school, tied all this together in 1969 into what he dubbed the efficient-market hypothesis. "A market in which prices always 'fully reflect' available information is called 'efficient,'" he wrote--and the evidence that such conditions prevailed in the U.S. stock market was "extensive, and (somewhat uniquely in economics) contradictory evidence is sparse...
Subsequent years saw more challenges to the core assumptions of the rational market. Even Fama retested his 1969 efficient-market hypothesis and found it wanting. But the strong performance of the U.S. stock market and economy tended to silence doubts about the wisdom of the market both on campus and where it really mattered--in Washington and on Wall Street. Shiller warned repeatedly of irrational exuberance in stocks in the late 1990s and in housing in the early 2000s. He was largely ignored both times--until he turned out to be right. Unwillingness to countenance the possibility that market prices...
...Harvard is the temple of the case method, the Gothic towers at the University of Chicago form the shrine of pure theory. "The case-study method is only a concoction that looks realistic," scoffs Eugene Fama, who teaches a notoriously tough lecture course in finance. "It's like an electronic hockey game that can never produce real hockey players." Chicago's first-year core courses cover statistics, managerial accounting, microeconomics and macroeconomics. The second-year electives put the theories to work: applied econometrics, financial instruments, application of finance theory. Though the emphasis on theory is heavy, Chicago officials...
...Fama semper vivat...