Tests of the semi-strong form of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) typically use earnings and book value of equity as benchmarks of fundamental value. Accounting earnings, however, are contaminated by noise due to their transient component and book value of equity tends to be biased...

We make two methodological modifications to the method of testing CAPM beta and we show that these significantly affect inferences about the association between CAPM beta and stock returns. While the conventional beta proxy is indeed largely unrelated to realized stock returns (in fact the...