Ten Nobels for the future

Franco Modigliani was born in 1918 in Rome where he received a Degree in Law from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1939. Because of the racial laws, he left that same year for New York and he received a D.S.S. from the New School for Social Research in 1944. After teaching economics at the University of Illinois, Harvard University, the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Northwestern University, in 1962 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of Economics and Finance and since 1988 he has been Institute Professor Emeritus.

Even after becoming an American citizen, Modigliani "has been a keen participant in the economic policy debate on major Italian issues. [...] His position has always reflected a well balanced progressivism. He has repeatedly strived to convince the public and policy-makers to assign top priority to full employment and to improve the situation of workers. At the same time, he has realistically pointed out that the economy's efficiency and competitiveness must be guaranteed in order to foster reliable growth" wrote the economist Carlo D'Adda in his foreword to the Italian edition of Modigliani's Savings, Deficits, Inflation and Financial Theory.

Franco Modigliani's work on monetary theory, capital markets, macroeconomics and econometrics has been widely acclaimed.

In 1985 Modigliani received the James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award from MIT and he was made Knight of the Grand Cross of the Italian Republic.

In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets". As stated in the press release of the Nobel Foundation: "The achievements for which Professor Modigliani is now to be rewarded concern the construction and development of the life-cycle hypothesis of household saving, and the formulation of the Modigliani-Miller theorems of the valuation of firms and of capital costs. [...] The life-cycle model represents a new paradigm in studies of consumption and saving, and is today the basis of most dynamic models used for such studies. [...] The Modigliani-Miller theorems represent a decisive break-through for the theory of corporate finance, and have had a great impact on later research in this area. Thus the scientific value of the authors' work is by no means limited to the formulation of the theorems, but refers to a great extent also to the introduction of a new method of analysis within the discipline of corporate finance".

He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is past President of the American Econometric Society, the American Economic Association and the American Finance Association, and honorary President of the International Economic Association. He has served as a consultant to the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve System, and a number of European banks.

He is the author of ten books, five volumes of his collected papers and numerous articles for scholarly journals. Among his best-known essays, The Collected Papers of Franco Modigliani, first published in five volumes by MIT Press, have been translated in many languages, including Chinese. His latest views on the recipe for balanced economic growth in Europe are presented in the "Manifesto against unemployment in Europe" ("BNL Quarterly Review", September 1998), which he signed together with six other prominent economists.

1996
Growth, investments,
public deficit
and Maastricht

1998
Technological innovation and labour policies

2000
Social reforms
and new economy