Merton Miller

Merton Miller
Born	Merton Howard Miller 16 May 1923(1923-05-16) Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Died	3 June 2000 (aged 77) Chicago, Illinois, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Economics
Alma mater	Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.) Harvard University (M.A.)
Doctoral advisor	Fritz Machlup
Doctoral students	Eugene Fama Michael Jensen Richard Roll Myron Scholes
Known for	Modigliani-Miller theorem
Notable awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1990)

Merton Howard Miller (May 16, 1923 – June 3, 2000) was the co-author of the Modigliani-Miller Model which proposed the irrelevance of debt-equity structure. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990, along with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe.

Biography

Early years

Miller was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Joel and Sylvia Miller, an attorney and housewife.^[1] He worked during World War II as an economist in the division of tax research of the Treasury Department, and received a Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, 1952. His first academic appointment after receiving his doctorate was Visiting Assistant Lecturer at the London School of Economics.

Career

In 1958, at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), he collaborated with his colleague Franco Modigliani there to write a paper on “The Cost of Capital, Corporate Finance and the Theory of Investment.” This paper urged a fundamental objection to the traditional view of corporate finance, according to which a corporation can reduce its cost of capital by finding the right debt-to-equity ratio. According to the Miller-Modigliani theorem, on the other hand, there is no right ratio, so corporate managers should seek to minimize tax liability and maximize corporate net wealth, letting the debt ratio chips fall where they will.

The way in which they arrived at this conclusion made use of the "no arbitrage" argument, i.e. the premise that any state of affairs that will allow traders of any market instrument to create a riskless money machine will almost immediately disappear. They set the pattern for many arguments based on that premise in subsequent years.

Mr. Miller wrote or co-authored eight books. He became a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1975 and was president of the American Finance Association in 1976. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business from 1961 until his retirement in 1993, although he continued teaching at the school for several more years.

He served as a public director on the Chicago Board of Trade 1983-85 and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from 1990 until his death in Chicago on June 3, 2000.

Personal life

Miller was married to Eleanor Miller, who died in 1969. He was survived by his second wife, Katherine Miller, and by three children from his first marriage and two grandsons.^[2] three children by his first marriage: Pamela (1952), Margot (1955), and Louise (1958).

Bibliography

• Merton H. Miller (1991). Merton Miller on Derivatives. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471183407. 
• Merton H. Miller (1991). Financial Innovations and Market Volatility. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 1557862524. 
• Merton, Miller H.; Charles W. Upton (1986). Macroeconomics: A Neoclassical Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226526232. 
• Kessel, Reuben A.; R. H. Coase, Merton H. Miller (1980). Essays in Applied Price Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226432009. 
• Fama, Eugene F.; Merton H. Miller (1972). The Theory of Finance. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. ISBN 0030867320. 

See also

• Modigliani-Miller theorem
• Eugene Fama

References

1. ^ "Merton H. Miller". The Notable Names Database. 2008. http://www.nndb.com/people/174/000159694/. Retrieved 2008-09-18. 
2. ^ Louis Uchitelle (2000). "Merton H. Miller, 77, Dies; Economist Who Won Nobel," New York Times, June 5.[1]

External links

• IDEAS/RePEc