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Following the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Basic, securities class plaintiffs can invoke the “rebuttable presumption of reliance on public, material misrepresentations regarding securities traded in an efficient market” [the “fraud-on-the-market” doctrine] to prove classwide reliance. Although this requires plaintiffs to prove that the security traded in an informationally efficient market throughout the class period, Basic did not identify what constituted adequate proof of efficiency for reliance purposes.

Market efficiency cannot be presumed without proof because even large publicly traded stocks do not always trade in efficient markets, as documented in the economic literature that has grown significantly since Basic. For instance, during the recent global financial crisis, lack of liquidity limited arbitrage (the mechanism that renders markets efficient) and led to significant price distortions in many asset markets. Yet, lower courts following Basic have frequently granted class certification based on a mechanical review of some factors that are considered intuitive “proxies” of market efficiency (albeit incorrectly, according to recent studies and our own analysis). Such factors have little probative value and their review does not constitute the rigorous analysis demanded by the Supreme Court.

Instead, to invoke fraud-on-the-market, plaintiffs must first establish that the security traded in a weak-form efficient market (absent which a security cannot, as a logical matter, trade in a “semi-strong form” efficient market, the standard required for reliance purposes) using well-accepted tests. Only then do event study results, which are commonly used to demonstrate “cause and effect” (i.e., prove that the security’s price reacted quickly to news – a hallmark of a semi-strong form efficient market), have any merit. Even then, to claim classwide reliance, plaintiffs must prove such cause-and-effect relationship throughout the class period, not simply on selected disclosure dates identified in the complaint as plaintiffs often do.

These issues have policy implications because, once a class is certified, defendants frequently settle to avoid the magnified costs and risks associated with a trial, and the merits of the case (including the proper application of legal presumptions) are rarely examined at a trial.

The economic doctrine of market efficiency plays an essential role in securities fraud litigation. In lawsuits alleging violations of SEC Rule 10b-5, the plaintiffs typically must argue that the market for the relevant security is efficient, and therefore that the “fraud on the market” doctrine applies. However, the term “market efficiency” is often applied imprecisely. In this chapter, we discuss properties of efficient markets that have been proposed in academic research, legal scholarship, and case law. We explore what must be assumed about capital markets for each of these properties to hold. We then ask how, in practice, each property could be rebutted.

This chapter focuses on information efficiency as provided by fair value accounting (FVA) and corporate governance (CG) practices in an emerging market. Positive accounting theory was adopted as an empirical model to test the relationship between information efficiency and stock prices. Data for the period 2007–2020 from 576 listed firms on the Stock Exchange of Thailand were collected, tested, and analyzed using a fixed effect estimator. The results indicate that investors in the stock market trust the use of publicized efficient information as provided by FVA and CG practices in making their investment decisions, when FVA and CG proxies were found to significantly influence stock prices. Hence, this evidence implies that information efficiency leads to better firm values in an emerging market.

Our chapter raises serious questions about the long-term efficiency of stock prices in relation to the realized returns of the underlying corporate real assets. In our large-scale calculations that cover horizons of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years, returns on corporate real assets suffer a long-term decline, and have been below the yields of 10-year Treasury bonds since 1973. Real assets that received more external financing from capital markets and institutions actually report even lower realized long-term returns. The decline in realized returns cannot be attributed to declining risks as the volatilities of realized returns have been increasing over time. These surprising results may stimulate fresh debate on the roles and long-term performance of capital markets and institutions.

We investigate the link between firm volatility and risk-taking (RT) among 4232 institutions across 11 countries during the period of 2000–2017 and find RT is negatively correlated with volatility measures. Second, a decomposition of the primary risk measure, the Z score and Merton distance-to-default, reveals that high RT contributed to lower stock return volatility mainly through better corporate governance, firm size, higher information efficiency, and strong BOD. Third, Australia firms engage in more RT compared to other countries. Finally, majority of the selected countries show the negative impact of RT in firm volatility in the pre-crises period (2002–2006) and during the crises period (2007–2009) but not in the post-crises period (2010–2014).

Deviations from efficiency widely documented for the case of developed capital markets include the presence of seasonal patterns. These anomalies, fairly well known by investors, could possibly lead to obtaining extraordinary gains. Although markets from the developing and transitional economies have grown significantly during the last decades, research concerning their seasonal behavior is limited. This paper examines the day-of-the week and month-of-the year effect for the seven Latin American stock exchanges: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Returns derived from the local nominal indexes, adjusted for inflation indexes, and dollar adjusted indexes are analyzed to identify the behavior of each exchange and draw some comparisons.

In the build-up of an investment decision, the existence of both active and passive investment vehicles triggers a puzzle for investors. Indeed the confrontation between active and index replication equity funds in terms of risk-adjusted performance and alpha generation has been a bone of contention since the inception of these investment structures. Accordingly, the objective of this chapter is to distinctly underscore whether an investor should be concerned in choosing between active and diverse passive investment structures.

The survivorship bias-free dataset consists of 776 equity funds which are domiciled either in America or Europe, and are likewise exposed to the equity markets of the same regions. In addition to geographical segmentation, equity funds are also categorised by structure and management type, specifically actively managed mutual funds, index mutual funds and passive exchange traded funds (‘ETFs’). This classification leads to the analysis of monthly net asset values (‘NAV’) of 12 distinct equally weighted portfolios, with a time horizon ranging from January 2004 to December 2014. Accordingly, the risk-adjusted performance of the equally weighted equity funds’ portfolios is examined by the application of mainstream single-factor and multi-factor asset pricing models namely Capital Asset Pricing Model (Fama, 1968; Fama & Macbeth, 1973; Lintner, 1965; Mossin, 1966; Sharpe, 1964; Treynor, 1961), Fama French Three-Factor (1993) and Carhart Four-Factor (1997).

Solely examination of monthly NAVs for a 10-year horizon suggests that active management is equivalent to index replication in terms of risk-adjusted returns. This prompts investors to be neutral gross of fees, yet when considering all transaction costs it is a distinct story. The relatively heftier fees charged by active management, predominantly initial fees, appear to revoke any outperformance in excess of the market portfolio, ensuing in a Fool’s Errand Hypothesis. Moreover, both active and index mutual funds’ performance may indeed be lower if financial advisors or distributors of equity funds charge additional fees over and above the fund houses’ expense ratios, putting the latter investment vehicles at a significant handicap vis-à-vis passive low-cost ETFs. This chapter urges investors to concentrate on expense ratios and other transaction costs rather than solely past returns, by accessing the cheapest available vehicle for each investment objective. Put simply, the general investor should retreat from portfolio management and instead access the market portfolio using low-cost index replication structures via an execution-only approach.

The battle among actively managed and index replication equity funds in terms of risk-adjusted performance and alpha generation has been a grey area since the inception of mutual funds. The interest in the subject constantly lightens up as fresh instruments infiltrate financial markets. Indeed the mutual fund puzzle (Gruber, 1996) together with the enhanced growth of ETFs has again rejuvenated the active versus passive debate, making it worth a detailed analysis especially for the benefit of investors who confront a dilemma in choosing between the two management styles.

Banks are intermediary institutions that play an important role in accelerating economic growth. Therefore, banks need to implement policies to improve the efficiency and quality of digital finance, namely through the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), which developed amid Society 5.0. However, the application of XBRL does not completely rule out the possibility of information asymmetry. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the effect of Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) on asymmetric information with corporate disclosure as a moderating variable (expected to reduce information asymmetry) and analyze the effect of XBRL and control variables (size, turnover, stock price) on information asymmetry. The sample used is conventional banks that have been listed on the IDX and are not delisted, from 2015, since the implementation of XBRL until 2019 using the panel data regression method. The results obtained are that information asymmetry decreases with the application of XBRL, where corporate disclosure is a moderating variable. For the results of the control variable, the larger the size, the less information asymmetry and turnover. As for the stock price, the higher the stock price, the higher the information asymmetry.

Using a large sample of diversified firms from 38 countries we investigate the influence of several national-level institutional factors or “institutional voids” on the value of corporate diversification. Specifically, we explore whether the presence of frictions in a country’s capital markets, labor markets, and product markets, affects the excess value of diversified firms. We find that the value of diversified firms relative to their single-segment peers is higher in countries with less-efficient capital and labor markets, but find no evidence that product market efficiency affects the relative value of diversification. These results provide support for the theory of internal capital markets that argues that internal capital allocation would be relatively more beneficial in the presence of frictions in the external capital markets. In addition, the results show that diversification can be beneficial in the presence of frictions in the labor market.