Miller, Merton H.

Miller, Merton H.,

1923–2000, American economist, grad. Harvard, 1943, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1952. A professor at Carnegie-Mellon Univ. (1953–61) and the Univ. of Chicago (1961–93), he developed a theory with Franco ModiglianiModigliani, Franco,
1918–2003, American economist, b. Rome. Jewish, antifascist, and trained as a lawyer, he fled Mussolini's Italy in 1938, settling in the United States in 1939, where he studied economics.
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 that seeks a relationship between a company's capital-asset structure and its market value. For his work, he shared the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with William Sharpe and Harry MarkowitzMarkowitz, Harry
, 1927–, American economist, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1954. In the 1950s he developed a theory of "portfolio choice," which allows investors to analyze risk as well as their expected return.
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Miller, Merton H.

(1923– ) economist; born in Boston, Mass. With Franco Modigliani he established the controversial "Modigliani-Miller theorems," which applied economic theory to the field of finance. The theorems assert that under perfect competition both the market value of a firm and the cost of capital to the firm are independent of its debt-equity ratio as well as its dividend-payout ratio. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago beginning in 1965.