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

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But that flyer, Merton Miller hastened to add, was strictly recreational, not serious investing.

ECONOMIST: Merton Miller

One Nobel laureate, Merton Miller, has given his backing to an idea that first surfaced at Hong Kong's University of Science and Technology.

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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.

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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

The Chicago native earned a finance doctorate at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, when he worked with advisors like Nobel Prize winner Merton Miller and Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, coauthors of the Black-Scholes options pricing model.

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