Merton Howard Miller was the co-author of the Modigliani–Miller theorem 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. Miller spent most of his academic career at the the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Miller was born Jewish, in Boston, Massachusetts to Joel and Sylvia Miller, an attorney and housewife. 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. In 1958, at Carnegie Institute of Technology , he collaborated with his colleague Franco Modigliani on the paper 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.
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