Is the Equity Market Informationally Efficient in Japan? Evidence from Leveraged Bootstrap Analysis

This paper defines mathematically different forms for the efficient market hypothesis and tests this hypothesis for the equity market in Japan with respect to the interest rate, industrial production, money supply, consumer price index and the real effective exchange rate during the period 1978-2002. We apply the leveraged bootstrap causality test which is robust to non-normality and ARCH effects. A new information criterion is used to choose the optimal lag order in the VAR model. The causality test results provide empirical evidence that the equity market is informationally efficient with regard to each of these macroeconomic variables. These results are supported by the generalized variance decompositions. Our findings imply that the possibility for arbitrage profits in the equity market is ruled out.