Franco Modigliani

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Franco Modigliani (2000, aged 82)

Franco Modigliani (born June 18, 1918 in Rome , † September 25, 2003 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an Italian- American economist and Nobel Prize winner and was awarded the 1985 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics .

Life

Franco Modigliani was born on June 17, 1918 to a Jewish family in Rome. His father, Enrico Modigliani, was a pediatrician, his mother Olga, née Flaschl, was a social worker. His parents hoped that he would follow his father's professional orientation to study medicine. Because of his low tolerance for physical suffering and blood, he initially decided to study law. At 17 he enrolled at the University of Rome. During his studies he became a member of the fascist university group GUF and won one of the I littoriali competitions. The associated written work, however, strengthened his motivation for economics. Through his friendly contact with an anti-fascist and during a stay in England in 1935, he was confronted with criticism of Mussolini's warlike policies and was clearly anti-fascist.

In 1938, the so-called race laws came into force in Italy. Because of his Jewish origins and his anti-fascist views, he initially stayed in Paris. Here he married Serena Calabi in May 1939 and tried to continue his studies at the Sorbonne. Due to the low pressure to perform here, he also wrote his doctoral thesis in the St. Genevieve library. He came back to Rome only briefly in June to defend his doctoral thesis. In August 1939 he left Italy and emigrated to the USA and arrived in New York shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Since he received a scholarship from the Graduate Faculty of Politics and Social Sciences in New York, he began a three-year course in the fall.

After graduating in 1941, he took a job as an instructor at the college for women in New Jersy. In the following year he moved to Bard College at Columbia University as a teacher for economics and statistics. Here he published his first article in English in the magazine Econometrica in January 1944 on the topic of "Liquidity Preference" in which he reprocessed parts of his doctoral thesis. In the same year he returned to the Institute for World Affairs at the New School in New York, where he primarily dealt with issues of national income and trade. He made a scientific contribution to research into saving that later became known as the Duesenberg-Modigliani hypothesis. In 1948 he received the Political Economy Fellowship from the University of Chicago, left New York and became a research consultant for the Cowies Commission for Research Economics. A little later, he accepted a job offer to lead a research project at the University of Illinois on "Expectations and Business Fluctuations." From 1953 to 1954 he worked intensively on the development of the "Life Cycle Hypothesis of Saving" and in the late 1950s he was working on a book about the problems of optimal business smoothing. In 1960 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1973 to the National Academy of Sciences . From 1962 he taught as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

In 1976, Modigliani served as president-elect of the American Economic Association .

research

Together with Merton H. Miller he developed the Modigliani-Miller theorem for corporate finance.

For the life cycle hypothesis he developed , the economics professor received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 1985 . The Neo-Keynesian also worked as an advisor to the US Federal Reserve .

In recent years he has repeatedly criticized President George W. Bush's economic stimulus package , which provides little incentive to invest and insufficiently stimulates demand. He also often criticized Italy's Silvio Berlusconi . (Quote: "Of course there are far fewer communists in Italy. But there are many more Berlusconis. That is the problem." )

Franco Modigliani died on September 25, 2003 in Massachusetts.

Web links

Commons : Franco Modigliani  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/franco-modigliani_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
  2. ^ Past and Present Officers. aeaweb.org ( American Economic Association ), accessed October 28, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Modigliani, Franco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American economist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 2003
Place of death Cambridge , Massachusetts