Pol Antràs is Professor of Economics at Harvard. He earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. He has directed the International Trade and Organizations Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research and is also affiliated with the CEPR in London. He has held visiting positions at MIT and LSE. He is co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and associate editor of several international journals. His research is in the area of international economics.

Carles Boix is the Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He graduated in Law and in History from the University of Barcelona, received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard and taught at The Ohio State University and the University of Chicago before joining Princeton. He is a Guggenheim fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He focuses his research on empirical democratic theory and comparative political economy.

Gerard Padró i Miquel is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and co-director of the research programme in Governance, Accountability and Political Economy of the International Growth Centre. He obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2005. He is a research fellow at the NBER (Cambridge, MA) and a research affiliate at the CEPR (London). He was an assistant professor at Stanford University and his research focuses on the fields of economic development and political economy.

Xavier Sala i Martin is the J. and M. Grossman Professor of Economic Development at Columbia University in the city of New York. He earned his PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 1990.He previously taught at Yale University, Harvard University and UPF in Barcelona. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Chief Economic Advisor to the Centre for Global Competitiveness at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His research interests include Economic Growth and Development and Macroeconomics.