An Entropic Analysis of Efficiency in the West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil Futures Market

Abstract

For the last 50 years or so, the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) has been the central pillar of economic thought and the building block of portfolio theory. However, the validity of the EMH still remains controversial, and the methods of testing for market efficiency have been criticised. This study utilises entropy analysis combined with generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) regressions to provide extensive empirical evidence on informational efficiency. This study develops an innovative method for studying market efficiency by investigating the complexity of information saturated in the market. To this end, we have used daily West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures contracts from June 1983 to February 2016, giving a total data set of 282,427 observations. The results of the Jensen–Shannon informational criteria indicate that the informational efficiency measure has never reached the maximum value of 1 which indicates weak-form efficiency. Our study has further found that the informational efficiency measure tends to decrease consistently during recessionary periods and to increase in subsequent periods. We have also found that the entropy measure tends to increase over time, supporting the adaptive market hypothesis over the EMH.

Keywords

• Market efficiency
• entropy
• complexity
• Shannon’s informational criteria
• GARCH model