Washington and Lee Law Review Volume 51 | Issue 3 Article 3 Summer 6-1-1994 Capital Market Theory, Mandatory Disclosure, and Price Discovery Lawrence A. Cunningham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr Part of the Securities Law Commons Recommended Citation Lawrence A. Cunningham, Capital Market Theory, Mandatory Disclosure, and Price Discovery, 51 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 843 (1994), https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol51/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Washington and Lee Law Review at Washington & Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington and Lee Law Review by an authorized editor of Washington & Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Capital Market Theory, Mandatory Disclosure, and Price Discovery Lawrence A. Cunningham* L Introduction The once-venerable "efficient capital market hypothesis" (ECMH) crashed along with world capital markets in October 1987, but its resilience has nearly matched the resilience of those markets. Despite another market break in 1989, for example, the ECMH has continued to be reflexively heralded by numerous corporate and securities law scholars as an accurate account of public capital market behavior. Together with overwhelming evidence of excessive market volatility, however, these catastrophic market breaks revealed instinct infirmities m the ECMH that could hardly be shrugged off as mere anomalies. In response to the ECMH's eroding descriptive and prescriptive power, capital market theorists found in noise theory an auxiliary explanation for these otherwise inexplicable catastrophes.