Merton Miller

Merton Howard Miller (May 16, 1923 – June 3, 2000) was an American economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990 for his fundamental contributions to the theory of corporate finance. Born in Boston, Miller earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and spent most of his career at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, where he became one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His most famous contribution, the Modigliani-Miller theorem (developed with Franco Modigliani), demonstrated that under certain conditions, a firm's value is independent of its capital structure—a revolutionary insight that reshaped corporate finance theory and practice. Miller's work laid the intellectual foundation for modern financial economics and influenced generations of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Beyond academia, he served as an advisor to the Federal Reserve and contributed to debates on monetary policy and financial regulation. His rigorous analytical approach and ability to distill complex financial phenomena into elegant theoretical frameworks earned him widespread respect and made him one of the architects of contemporary finance.