اعتماد به نفس، نظرات در مورد بازده بازار و رفتار سرمایه گذاری از اساتید امور مالی

We identify finance professors’ opinions on the efficiency of the stock markets in the United States and assess whether their views on efficiency influence their investing behavior. Employing a survey distributed to over 4,000 professors, we obtain four main results. First, most professors believe the market is weak to semi-strong efficient. Second, twice as many professors passively invest than actively invest. Third, our respondents’ perceptions regarding market efficiency are almost entirely unrelated to their trading behavior. Fourth, the investment objectives of professors are, instead, largely driven by the same behavioral factor as for amateur investors–one's confidence in his own abilities to beat the market, independent of his opinion of market efficiency.

One of the most fundamental questions related to investing is whether one should actively or passively invest. Presumably, the first factor to consider in making this decision is the efficiency of the market in which one is considering investing. Actively investing in a perfectly efficient market will not yield consistent abnormal returns, so why bother? Many studies address market efficiency, with inconclusive results. There is, however, very little empirical evidence corroborating or refuting the notion that an investor's decision to actively or passively invest is strongly influenced by his perception of market efficiency. We take a unique approach to provide evidence on this issue. We survey the experts in the field–finance professors–to assess (a) their views of the actual efficiency of stock markets in the United States and (b) whether their propensity to actively or passively invest is influenced by their perceptions of market efficiency. We find that finance professors strongly agree that the market is not strong form efficient. To a slightly lesser degree they also concur that the market is weak form efficient. However, they show little agreement regarding the semi-strong form market efficiency. Despite their ostensible disagreement, their investing objectives suggest they generally believe that markets are semi-strong form efficient; twice as many of them passively invest as actively invest. We also come to the surprising conclusion that a finance professor's opinion of market efficiency has little influence on his decision to actively or passively invest. Instead, they largely base their investing decisions on their confidence in their own abilities to beat the market, independent of their opinion about market efficiency. This contradicts the fundamental notion that the active versus passive decision is driven by an assessment of the market's efficiency. This finding adds to the practical importance of studies on market efficiency, highlights the importance of investor behavior, and motivates further work on confidence in investing. The remainder of the study proceeds as follows. We describe the subjects, survey, and response rate in Section 2. We present finance professors’ explicit opinions about market efficiency in Section 3. In Section 4 we analyze professors’ opinions of market efficiency through an analysis of their investing objectives. We explore the question of whether a respondent's decision to actively or passively invest is related to his perceptions of market efficiency in Section 5. We conclude with Section 6.

We use a comprehensive survey distributed to over 4,000 finance professors in the U.S. to assess their opinions on market efficiency and explore the idea that the decision to actively or passively invest is strongly influenced by an investor's perception of the efficiency of the market. The 642 respondents seem to agree that the stock market is not strong form efficient and is weak form efficient. However, they seem undecided about semi-strong form efficiency. Market efficiency specialists believe more strongly than their counterparts that the market is not efficient. We also analyze respondents’ investment objectives and behavior to gain a deeper understanding of how they truly perceive market efficiency. We find that twice as many respondents passively invest than actively invest, suggesting that although they may be conflicted about market efficiency, they generally behave as if they accept markets as efficient. Alternatively, this result could mean that they choose to passively invest even if they believe in inefficient markets due to time, resource, or skill restraints. Respondents who specialize in market efficiency manifest similar investment objectives as that of the overall sample. Regarding our second objective, we find that investment behavior has very little to do with a respondent's opinions about market efficiency. Instead, investment objectives and behavior are driven by individuals’ confidence in their own abilities to beat the market, regardless of their opinions about market efficiency. Despite our respondents’ education and sophistication, they seem to set investment objectives and make trades largely based on the same behavioral factor that drives amateur investors—confidence. Opinions of efficiency do not seem to affect investing decisions, while confidence does. This paper represents the first essay of Colby Wright's dissertation. We thank Gary Benesh, Mike Brady, Prithviraj Banerjee, Jim Brau, Ronnie Clayton, Michael Ehrhardt, Campbell Harvey, Matthew Spiegel, Tom Noe, and Brian Tarrant for their insightful suggestions. We also thank an anonymous reviewer and the editor, Eugene Kandel, for very helpful comments and direction. Additionally, we thank Misty Wright for her expert assistance in collecting the data for this study. All errors in the paper are our own.