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.
Merton Miller

What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from.
Merton Miller

I can't speak for them, of course, but I believe that most economists would accept the view that, while you sometimes can make a score by sheer luck, you can't do it constantly, unless you're willing to put the resources in.
Merton Miller

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.
Merton Miller

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.
Merton Miller

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.
Merton Miller

So everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it, and get it incorporated into prices.
Merton Miller