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.
 
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 RepublicIn the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets".
 
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 twenty books, 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
 
He worked for the pension reform in Europe and Us.
 
Professor Franco Modigliani passes away, in his house of Boston, on the 25th of september 2003.