The Times

Abstract

As Eugene Fama researched and prepared his PhD thesis at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Merton Miller, he sought to resolve an increasingly problematic empirical observation at odds with emerging theory. By the early 1960s, especially after the analysis by Matthew Fontaine Maury Osborne in 1959, it had become accepted that the logarithm of securities prices was the appropriate measure of analysis. However, the resulting distribution of unexplained price variations under this transformation remained a subject of debate, and the serial correlation of observations that follow this distribution was a topic of growing interest.