Merton Miller

Miller, born to a Jewish family in Boston, became a leading figure of the Chicago school of finance. With Franco Modigliani he proved the Modigliani-Miller theorems, showing that under idealized conditions a firm's value depends on its real assets and earnings, not on how it mixes debt and equity or pays dividends. These results, which gave corporate finance a rigorous theoretical foundation, earned him a share of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.