  Hypothesis of Market Efficiency is an important concept for the investors
across the globe holding diversified portfolios. With the world economy getting
more integrated day by day, more people are investing in global emerging
markets. This means that it is pertinent to understand the efficiency of these
markets. This paper tests for market efficiency by studying the impact of
global financial crisis of 2008 and the recent Chinese crisis of 2015 on stock
market efficiency in emerging stock markets of China and India. The data for
last 20 years was collected from both Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE200) and the
Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index and divided into four sub-periods, i.e.
before financial crisis period (period-I), during recession (period-II), after
recession and before Chinese Crisis (periodIII) and from the start of Chinese
crisis till date (period- IV). Daily returns for the SSE and BSE were examined
and tested for randomness using a combination of auto correlation tests, runs
tests and unit root tests (Augmented Dickey-Fuller) for the entire sample
period and the four sub-periods. The evidence from all these tests supports
that both the Indian and Chinese stock markets do not exhibit weak form of
market efficiency. They do not follow random walk overall and in the first
three periods (1996 till the 2015) implying that recession did not impact the
markets to a great extent, although the efficiency in percentage terms seems to
be increasing after the global financial crisis of 2008.
