Merton Miller American economist Date of Birth: 16.05.1923 Country: USA

Biography of Merton Miller

Merton Howard Miller was an American economist who was born on May 16, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of lawyer Joel Miller and homemaker Sylvia Miller. During World War II, Merton worked as an economist in the Department of Treasury's Tax Division and earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University in 1952. He began his career as an assistant lecturer at the London School of Economics.

In 1958, while at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), Miller collaborated with his colleague Franco Modigliani to write a paper titled "The Cost of Capital, Corporate Finance and the Theory of Investment." This work challenged the traditional view of corporate finance which suggested that companies could reduce the cost of capital by finding the right debt-to-equity ratio. According to the Modigliani-Miller theorem, there is no optimal capital structure, so managers should focus on minimizing tax obligations and maximizing corporate net assets.

Merton Miller was the co-author of the Modigliani-Miller theorem, which states that the market value of a firm is independent of its capital structure. In 1990, Miller shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe for their work on the theory of financial economics. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he taught from 1961 until his retirement in 1993.

Merton Miller authored or co-authored eight books and was a member of the Econometric Society and the American Finance Association. He served as a public director at the Chicago Board of Trade from 1983 to 1985 and worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from 1990 until his death. Merton Miller was married to Eleanor Miller, who passed away in 1969. He later married Katherine Miller and had three children from his first marriage: Pamela (born 1952), Margo (born 1955), and Louise (born 1958). Merton Miller passed away on June 3, 2000, leaving behind his second wife, Katherine, and two grandchildren.