Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn't affect the size of the pizza. And similarly, the stocks, bonds, warrants, etc., issued don't affect the aggregate value of the firm.
From Merton Miller
As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a company that was advising customers about portfolio decisions, writing reports.
I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 16, 1923, the only child of Joel and Sylvia Miller.
My main interest, however, was in economics, not law.
My research interests since then have shifted strongly towards the economic and regulatory problems of the financial services industry, and especially of the securities and options exchanges.
My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.
I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.
Another is, if you take money out of your left pocket and put it in your right pocket, you're no richer.
Arbitrage proof has since been widely used throughout finance and economics.
What happened after publication of our paper was that, for the next 40 years, people said, all right, we now know the answer to the capital structure question under ideal conditions.
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