James D. Hamilton received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a professor at the University of California, San Diego since 1992 and served as Chair of the Economics Department from 1999 to 2002.  He is the author of Time Series Analysis, the leading text on forecasting and statistical analysis of dynamic economic relationships.  He has done extensive research on business cycles, monetary policy, and oil shocks, and has frequently been a research adviser and visiting scholar with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve as well as individual Federal Reserve banks. 

Ross Levine currently holds the Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute and an advisor to the World Economic Forum. He received his B.A. in economics from Cornell University in 1982, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1987. Upon completion of his doctorate, he began work as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. From 1990 to 1997, he was a principal economist at The World Bank.  He became an associate professor at the University of Virginia in 1997 and was granted tenure two years later. From 1999 to 2005, he was the Curtis L. Carlson Professor of Finance at the University of Minnesota. In 2005, he was hired by the Department of Economics at Brown University, where he taught an undergraduate course on financial institutions and an advanced seminar on financial regulation. In February 2010, he debated the merits of financial innovation with Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in an online series for The Economist. He was hired by Berkeley in 2012 but remains an advisor to the United States Treasury, Federal Reserve System, and the International Monetary Fund.

Yona Rubinstein received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1999 and is currently Reader in Managerial Economics and Strategy at the London School of Economics. He was previously Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Brown University, and Senior Lecturer at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Tel Aviv University.

Paul Willen is a senior economist and policy advisor in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His research focuses on household financial management; recently he has spent much of his time studying mortgage markets. His research appears in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Theory, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics, the NBER Macro Annual, the Brookings papers on Economic Activity, and elsewhere. Willen's research on the origins of the subprime crisis has appeared in scholarly journals and has been cited in virtually every major newspaper in the United States. Prior to joining the Boston Fed in 2004, he was on the faculty at Princeton and the University of Chicago. He has also been a visiting member of the faculty at MIT in each of the last three years. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University.

Giovanni Peri is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a CESifo Research Fellow. He is Associate Editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics and of the Journal of Population Economics. He has published in several academic journals including the Review of Economic Studies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the European Economic Review and the Journal of International Economics. He has done research on Human Capital, Growth and technological Innovation. More recently he has focused on the impact of international migrations on labor markets, housing markets and productivity of the receiving countries and on the determinants of international migrations. In the summer 2007 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Grant for the Study of International Migration and its impact in the US. In 2009 he has received a World Bank Grant for the study of return migration in Europe. Peri obtained his Ph.D. in Economics at U.C. Berkeley. He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in May 2011.

Chad Sparber is an Associate Professor of Economics at Colgate University. His research agenda has focused upon the skills and composition of the American workforce, with an emphasis on the effects of racial diversity and the causes and consequences of immigration. Though his initial work adopted a macroeconomic perspective, he as increasingly borrowed insights and tools from labor economics, urban economics, international trade, and public economics. He eared his PhD and MA from the University of California-Davis.