Modigliani, Franco, 1918–2003, American economist, b. Rome. Jewish, antifascist, and trained as a lawyer, he fled Mussolini's Italy in 1938, settling in the United States in 1939, where he studied economics. After teaching at various universities, he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 (emeritus in 1988), Modigliani won the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work in economic theory. He developed a life-cycle theory about the fluctuations in personal savings over an individual's lifetime, which states that people save to spend their money during retirement. He also demonstrated that corporate debt had less affect on how investors value a company than did the company's profitability, and helped devise an economic forecasting model used by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Modigliani, Franco

(born June 18, 1918, Rome, Italy—died Sept. 25, 2003, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.) Italian-born U.S. economist. He fled fascist Italy for the U.S. in 1939 and earned a doctorate from the New School for Social Research in 1944. He taught at several universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1962–88; thereafter professor emeritus). His work on personal savings prompted him to formulate the life-cycle theory, which asserts that individuals build up savings during their younger working lives for use during their own old age and not as an inheritance for their descendants. In order to analyze financial markets, he invented a technique for calculating the value of a company's expected future earnings that became a basic tool in corporate decision making and finance. He received the Nobel Prize in 1985.

Modigliani, Franco (1918– ) economist; born in Rome, Italy. He emigrated to the U.S.A. after receiving a degree from the University of Rome in 1939. He taught at several universities before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. In the early 1950s, he originated the "lifecycle hypothesis" which provided a microeconomic foundation in individual behavior for patterns of national savings. With Merton Miller, he established the "Modigliani-Miller theorems," which applied economic theory to the field of finance. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (1985).