Sometimes the Nobel committee seems to make a partly political statement in choosing winners of the prize in economics. Not this year. On Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2013 Nobel to three deserving American economists: Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen at the University of Chicago and Robert Shiller of Yale University. The prizes were based on the importance of their work, which 'laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices.'
时诺贝尔奖评审委员会在选择经济学奖得主时似乎还想体现一些政治意义。但今年不然。周一，瑞典皇家科学院(Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)将2013年诺贝尔经济学奖授予三位当之无愧的美国经济学家：芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)的尤金?法马(Eugene Fama)和拉斯?彼得?汉森(Lars Peter Hansen)以及耶鲁大学(Yale University)的罗伯特?席勒(Robert Shiller)。他们所做工作的重要意义使他们获得了这一奖项，他们的工作“为目前对资产价格的理解奠定了基础。”
Mr. Fama's major contribution, notably with the 1965 paper 'Random Walks in Stock Market Prices, ' has been to show that stock markets are very efficient. The term 'efficient' here does not mean what it normally means in economics-namely, that benefits minus costs are maximized. Instead, it means that prices of stocks rapidly incorporate information that is publicly available.
法马的主要贡献是显示股票市场非常有效率。他的重要文献是1965年发表的论文《股票市场价格的随机游走》(Random Walks in Stock Market Prices)。这里“有效率”一词的意思并非经济学中通常所指的减去成本的收益最大化，而是指股价会迅速消化公开的信息。
That happens because markets are so competitive. Prices now move on earnings news not just within seconds, but within milliseconds-which is why you're already too late if you decide to buy Apple AAPL +0.66% stock after hearing about an unexpectedly high earnings report. There are quicker trigger fingers acting instantly on new information. But even before supercomputers got into the game, markets were reacting very efficiently.
之所以会发生这样的情况，是因为市场竞争非常激烈。现在股价对收益消息的反应不是在几秒内做出的，而是在千分之一秒内做出的，所以如果你在听到苹果公司 (Apple)意外公布高收益报告后才决定买进该公司股票，已经为时太晚。现在有更快的系统可以对新消息立即做出反应。但即便在超级计算机获得应用前，市场反应也非常有效率。
One implication of market efficiency is that trading rules, such as 'buy when the price fell yesterday, ' don't work. The insight has had big implications for large and small investors: Don't waste your money on professional financial managers who actively try to pick individual stocks.
这种市场效率的一个启示是，诸如“在昨日股价下跌后买进”等交易规则是无效的。这种见解给大型和小型投资者带来重要启示：不要在那些积极尝试挑选个股的专业理财经理身上浪费你的钱了。
One high-profile beneficiary of Mr. Fama's insight was John Bogle, who started the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in the 1970s. His idea was to have a fund indexed to the overall market and save the costs of hiring experts to predict stock prices. He shared Mr. Fama's skepticism about golden stock-pickers. The result is that over the past four decades millions of investors who buy index funds from Vanguard and its competitors have saved hundreds of billions of dollars by not paying for dubious investment advice.
法马理论的一个知名受益者是博格尔(John Bogle)，他在上世纪70年代创建了Vanguard 500指数基金(Vanguard 500 Index Fund)。他的想法是建立一只与整体市场指数挂钩的基金，省下雇佣专家预测股价的成本。他认同法马对黄金选股者的质疑。这种做法的结果是，过去40年从 Vanguard及其竞争对手处购买指数基金的数百万投资者没有在值得怀疑的投资建议上浪费金钱，从而节省了数千亿美元的资金。
Mr. Fama, 74, is also skeptical of the word 'bubble, ' which suggests market inefficiency by letting stock prices rise higher than justified by market fundamentals. In 2010, he told the New Yorker magazine: 'It's easy to say prices went down, it must have been a bubble, after the fact. I think most bubbles are twenty-twenty hindsight. . . . People are always saying that prices are too high. When they turn out to be right, we anoint them. When they turn out to be wrong we ignore them.'
现年74岁的法马也对“泡沫”一词持怀疑态度，泡沫通常意味着市场出现允许股价涨势脱离基本面的失效情况。2010年，他曾对《纽约客》(New Yorker)杂志表示，在股价下跌的事实发生后，我们可以很容易地说这肯定是泡沫所致。我认为多数泡沫论断都是事后诸葛亮，人们总是说，价格太高了。当事实证明他们是对的，我们就会将他们神化，当事实证明他们是错的，我们就会忽略他们。
In the Milton Friedman University of Chicago tradition, Mr. Fama believes that free markets are better than government at allocating resources. He strongly opposed the 2008 selective bailout of Wall Street firms, arguing that, without it, financial markets would have sorted themselves out within 'a week or two.'
继承了芝加哥大学经济学家米尔顿?弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)的传统，法马认为，自由市场比政府更善于进行资源配置。他强烈反对2008年政府对华尔街公司进行有选择的救助，他说，如果政府不出手，金融市场会在“一两周左右”的时间里解决自身问题。
Robert Shiller's contribution to our understanding of asset prices has included this insight: that stock prices fluctuate more than can be explained by fluctuations in dividends. The 67-year-old Mr. Shiller's finding in the 1980s set off a revolution in finance. It is now accepted that high prices relative to earnings signal low subsequent returns and vice-versa. This means, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has noted, that (contra Mr. Fama) a very patient investor should be able to beat the market by betting against short-term market movements. So, for example, if the price has fallen more than can be explained by relatively steady dividends, you should buy and hold.
席勒对我们理解资产价格做出的贡献包括这样一个理论：股价的波动幅度会超过派息波动理论上应该引发的价格波动幅度。现年67岁的席勒在上世纪80年代取得的研究结果在金融领域引发了一场革命。现在人们普遍接受这样的观点，那就是当股价相对收益来说偏高时，就预示未来回报将较低，反之亦然。这意味着，就像乔治梅森大学(George Mason University)经济学家考恩(Tyler Cowen)所说，(与法马的观点相反)非常有耐心的投资者应当能够通过反向押注短期市场走势而战胜市场。所以，比如说，如果股价下跌幅度难以用相对稳定的派息来解释，你应该买进并持有。
Mr. Shiller's work has been particularly notable for two reasons: his contribution to the Case-Shiller home price index, which has been invaluable for those who want good data on home prices both nationally and regionally; and his proposal that government pensions and entitlements be 'indexed to some indicator of taxpayer ability to pay, such as GDP.' Thus government payments for pensions and entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare would be tethered to the relative health of the nation's economy, and the government wouldn't, as it does now, continue to spend itself ruinously into debt. Mr. Shiller's young students-given that they're of the generation likely to be surrendering more and more of their income to the government to support its payments-should consider building a statue of him.
席勒的贡献尤其重要的原因有两个：其一是他对Case-Shiller住房价格指数的贡献，对那些想要获得全国和地区房价可靠数据的人来说，这个指数一直极具价值;其二是他建议政府退休金和福利支出与一些衡量纳税人支付能力的指标挂钩，比如国内生产总值(GDP)数据。也就是说，政府在退休金和福利方面的支出(比如社会保障(Social Security)和联邦医疗保险(Medicare)项目)将与国内经济的相对健康程度挂钩，政府不应像现在这样为保持这些支出而债台高筑。席勒年轻的学生们应该考虑为他树碑立传，因为他们这一代可能会将越来越多的收入拱手交给政府来支持其开支。
The third recipient of the Nobel economics prize, Lars Peter Hansen, 60, earned it for the mathematical techniques he developed that apply to stock prices and other economic models. Here's how John H. Cochrane, a University of Chicago colleague of Mr. Hansen's, put it to me in an interview: 'Hansen managed to boil all the complex statistical techniques used in understanding economic models to just taking averages. His techniques allowed economists to study the economy one piece at a time, and to focus on the robust, important predictions of a model without being distracted by irrelevant sideshows.'
另一位诺贝尔经济学奖得主是现年60岁的汉森。他因为研究出适用于股票价格和其他经济模型的数学方法而获得这一奖项。汉森在芝加哥大学的同事科克伦 (John H. Cochrane)在接受笔者采访时说，汉森设法从所有复杂的用于理解经济模型的统计方法中提炼出取平均值的方法。他研究出的方法使经济学家可以对经济进行逐一研究，并聚焦一个模型强有力的、重要的预测，而不必为不相关的次要问题分心。
As the Nobel committee wrote: 'Understanding how mispricing of assets emerges, and when and why financial markets do not efficiently reflect available information, is one of the most important tasks for future research.' Messrs. Fama, Shiller and Hansen opened the door, with implications that extend far beyond Wall Street.
诺贝尔奖评审委员会写道，了解资产如何出现错误定价，金融市场何时以及为何不能有效反应可获得的信息，这是未来研究的重要任务之一。法马、席勒和汉森开启了这扇大门，他们带来的启示将影响到华尔街以外很远的地方。
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with Stanford University's Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.
(Henderson是斯坦福大学(Stanford University)胡佛研究院(Hover Institution)的研究员，并且是美国海军研究生院(Naval Postgraduate School)的经济学教授。
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