John Joseph Wallis is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 1981 and had a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. Professor Wallis is an economic historian who specializes in the public finance of American governments and more generally in the relation between the institutional co-development of governments and economics. His large-scale research on American state finance and institutions has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

Steven B. Webb worked at the World Bank for twenty-one years as an economist and advisor on policy research, evaluation and operations for Latin America and the Caribbean and other regions. He currently serves as a consultant to the Bank. Dr Webb's specializations include political economy, decentralization, public finance, central banks and monetary policy and economic history. His publications include Public Sector Reform - What Works and Why (2008), Achievements and Challenges in Decentralization (2000) and Voting for Reform: The Politics of Adjustment in New Democracies (1994, edited with Stephan Haggard).

Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. Professor Weingast spent ten years at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Economics and the School of Business. The recipient of the Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize and the James Barr Memorial Prize, he has also worked extensively with the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development. Professor Weingast co-authored Analytical Narratives (1998) and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (2006).