The Blog of Death

Franco Modigliani

Franco Modigliani, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, died on Sept. 25. Cause of death was not released. He was 85.

Modigliani was born in Italy. He studied economics and law at the University of Rome, but was forced to immigrate to the United States at the beginning of World War II to avoid religious and political persecution.

He received a doctorate in social science at the New School for Social Research in New York, joined the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, then taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. There he developed his best-known work, the life-cycle hypothesis.

He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. During his three decades at the university, Modigliani developed a reputation as a world-class economist for his writings on inflation and public deficits.

In 1985, Modigliani won the Nobel Prize in economics for researching how people save for retirement and how the market value of businesses is determined. He was also the former president of the American Economic Association, and the author of the autobiography, "The Adventures of an Economist."