In 1958 professors Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller showed that this kind of thinking is wrong.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The citation picked out for special mention his work with Franco Modigliani, who had received the Nobel in 1985.

ECONOMIST: Merton Miller

Merton Miller and his colleague Franco Modigliani posited their capital structure irrelevance theorem in the late 1950s, when the dollar was as good as gold at least for foreign creditors.

FORBES: Debt-Free Firms Have The Edge With Rates Going Up

But in 1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, two American economists, showed that the value of a firm should be unaffected by whether it is financed using all debt, all equity, or a mix of the two.

ECONOMIST: Stocks in trade | The