Maurice Kendall - London School of Economics

London School of Economics

In 1949 he accepted the second chair of statistics at the London School of Economics, University of London. Here he worked part-time as the director of the new Research Techniques Division. From 1952 to 1957 he edited a two-volume work on Statistical Sources in the United Kingdom, which was a standard reference until the mid-1970s. In the fifities he also worked on multivariate analysis, and developed the text Multivariate Analysis in 1957. In the same year he also developed, along with W. R. Buckland, a Dictionary of Statistical Terms, aimed at helping making the tools of statistics more available to potential users in industry and government.

In 1953 he published " The Analytics of Economic Time Series, Part 1: Prices" in which he suggested that the movement of shares on the stock market was random i.e. they were as likely to go up on a certain day as they were to go down. These results were disturbing to some financial economists and further debate and research then followed. This ultimately led to the creation of the Random Walk Hypothesis, and the closely related efficient-market hypothesis which states that random price movements indicate a well-functioning or efficient market.