The Adjustment of Stock Prices to New Information

Abstract

There is an impressive body of empirical evidence which indicates that successive price changes in individual common stocks are very nearly independent. Recent papers by Mandelbrot and Samuelson show rigorously that independence of successive price changes is consistent with an efficient market, i.e., a market that adjusts rapidly to new information.

It is important to note, however, that in the empirical work to date the usual procedure has been to infer market efficiency from the observed independence of successive price changes. There has been very little actual testing of the speed of adjustment of prices to specific kinds of new information. The prime concern of this paper is to examine the process by which common stock prices adjust to the information (if any) that is implicit in a stock split. In doing so we propose a new event study methodology for measuring the effects of actions and events on security prices.

Keywords: efficient markets, effect of information on stock prices, stock splits, dividend increases, market conditions, rate of return, effect of split(s) on return(s), residuals, average dividends, dividend increases, and dividend decreases