It probably should have been the first item in this course as this idea is possibly the most influential concept in contemporary Economics. Many would say the most damaging concept.
The original paper by Eugene Fama from 1965 is so long that we selected a later paper by Fama, his review from 1970. It is still a long and complex paper, we have highlighted selected several paragraphs for reading.
The style of the paper is very different from our next reading, Akerlof's elegant Market for Lemons.
Fama deals with empirical research of complex phenomenon with a lot of data, so elegance of writing is not possible. But the idea that markets are efficient is so attempting and influential that the effort in reading parts of the paper is worthwhile.
We have also considered the recent arguments against and for this hypothesis as reflected by The Economist.
