Every student of finance or applied economics learns the lessons of Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller. Their landmark paper, published in 1958, laid out the basic underpinnings of modern finance and these two distinguished academics were both subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Simply stated, companies create value when they generate returns that exceed their costs. More specifically, the returns of successful companies will exceed the risk-adjusted cost of the capital used to run the business. Further, these returns and the securities of the underlying companies must be judged against an uncertain backdrop, such that the risk-adjusted expected returns.
