Miller, Merton Howard (1923-2000), an American economist, was one of the leading figures in the area of corporate finance. He devised the Modigliani-Miller theorem in collaboration with Italian-born Franco Modigliani, another economist (see Modigliani, Franco ). This theory showed that the profitability of a company’s activities is more important than how it obtains the funding for those activities. Miller was awarded the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 1990 for his work on theories of corporate finance. He shared the prize with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe (see Markowitz, Harry Max ; Sharpe, William Forsyth ).
Miller was born in Boston. He received his doctorate in economics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. During World War II (1939-1945), Miller worked in the U.S. Department of the Treasury and for the Federal Reserve System. From 1953 until 1961, he taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). It was there that he began his collaboration with Franco Modigliani on research into corporation finance. Miller then went to the University of Chicago, where he became a professor. Miller’s public appointments included those of a director of the Chicago Board of Trade and of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, two of the largest commodity exchanges in the United States. At the Mercantile Exchange, he was involved in investigating the financial crash of October 1987.
