Miller, Merton H.

Merton Howard Miller (1923-2000) was an economist who won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research in corporate finance. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Miller attended Harvard University (A.B., 1944). In the mid- to late 1940s, Miller worked as an economist for the United States Treasury Department's Division of Tax Research, and the Division of Research and Statistics of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1952, mentored by Fritz Machlup.

After graduation from Johns Hopkins, Miller briefly held an appointment at the London School of Economics as an assistant lecturer in American economic history. In 1953, he moved on to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), where he began working with Franco Modigliani on a series of papers on corporate finance. The two developed the Modigliani-Miller theorem, which holds that under certain assumptions the value of a firm is independent of the firm's ratio of debt to equity. The Modigliani-Miller theorem is now fundamental to thinking on capital structure.

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