Capital Flow Watch

Eugene Francis “Gene” Fama (born February 14, 1939) is an American economist, known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing, both theoretical and empirical. He is currently Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
He earned his undergraduate degree in French from Tufts University in 1960 and his M.B.A. and Ph.D. from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago in economics and finance; his doctoral supervisor was Benoit Mandelbrot. He has spent all of his teaching career at the University of Chicago.
His Ph.D. thesis, which concluded that stock price movements are unpredictable and follow a random walk, was published in January, 1965 issue of the Journal of Business, entitled “The Behavior of Stock Market Prices”. That work was subsequently rewritten into a less technical article, “Random Walks In Stock Market Prices”, which was published in the Financial Analysts Journal in 1965 and Institutional Investor in 1968.
His article “The Adjustment of Stock Prices to New Information” in the International Economic Review, 1969 (with several co-authors) was the first event study that sought to analyze how stock prices respond to an event, using price data from the newly available CRSP database. This was the first of literally hundreds of such published studies.

Fama is most often thought of as the father of efficient market hypothesis, beginning with his Ph.D. thesis. In a ground-breaking article in the May, 1970 issue of the Journal of Finance, entitled “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work,” Fama proposed two crucial concepts that have defined the conversation on efficient markets ever since. First, Fama proposed three types of efficiency: (i) strong-form; (ii) semi-strong form; and (iii) weak efficiency. Second, Fama demonstrated that the notion of market efficiency could not be rejected without an accompanying rejection of the model of market equilibrium (e.g. the price setting mechanism). This concept, known as the “joint hypothesis problem,” has ever since vexed researchers. (Wikipedia Jan 2010)