Is Pharmaceuticals Industry Efficient? Evidence from Dhaka Stock Exchange

Abstract

This study examines the weak form market efficiency of the thirteen listed pharmaceuticals company of Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE). We exclude the three listed pharmaceuticals company because of their newly enlistment at DSE. The data consists of the daily returns from 1^st January, 2009 to 31^st December, 2013. The returns of all pharmaceuticals companies are not normally distributed. Unit root test, serial correlation test and runs tests are being used for testing weak form efficiency of the individual stocks return. The findings of the runs test is completely rejecting the random walk theory for all thirteen securities whereas the augmented dickey-fuller (ADF) test are showing inverse result with its all three equations suggesting the weak form efficiency of the Pharmaceuticals stock return. The results of the Autocorrelation and Box-Ljung statistics support random walk theory for ten companies and reject it for ACI, Reckitt Benckiser and Pharma Aid. However, from the summery of findings we can agree that the Pharmaceuticals industry of Bangladesh is just becoming weak-form efficient.