Mark P. Taylor is the Donald Danforth, Jr Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis, USA. He was previously Dean of the Olin Business School and, before that, Dean and Professor of Finance and Economics at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, UK. He obtained his first degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University and his Master's and Doctoral degrees in economics and finance from London University. Professor Taylor has taught economics and finance at various universities (including Oxford, New York, Bordeaux and Aix-Marseille) and at various levels (including principles courses and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses). He has also worked as a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund and at the Bank of England and as a managing director at BlackRock, the world's largest financial asset manager, where he ran a global investment fund based on macroeconomic analysis. His research has been extensively published in scholarly journals and he is today one of the most highly cited economists in the world.

Celeste Campher is a Lecturer at the Department of Economics at the University of the Free State. She currently lectures both Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at an undergraduate level and Research Methodology at post-graduate level. She has nearly 15 years lecturing experience, and also worked as a public servant in the Office of the Premier, and the Provincial Treasury in the Free State province. She is currently studying for her PhD, which is focused on the use of incentivised social discounting tasks to determine the association between social distance and time, risk and other preferences.

RONNEY NCWADI is the first black academic to be appointed Head of Economics at Nelson Mandela University. Prior to that, he was a director in the Macroeconomic Analysis Unit of the Eastern Cape Provincial Treasury and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Management and Commerce at Fort Hare University.