Paul Krugman, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, taught at Princeton University for 14 years. In 2015, he joined the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, associated with the Luxembourg Income Study, which tracks and analyses income inequality around the world. He received his BA from Yale and his PhD from MIT. Before Princeton, he taught at Yale, Stanford, and MIT. He also spent a year on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers in 1982-1983. His research has included trailblazing work on international trade, economic geography, and currency crises. In 1991, Krugman received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark medal. In addition to his teaching and academic research, Krugman writes extensively for nontechnical audiences. He is a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

Maurice Obstfeld is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. He joined Berkeley in 1989 as a professor, following appointments at Columbia (1979-1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986-1989). He was also a visiting professor at Harvard between 1989 and 1991. In 2014-2015 he was a Member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and from 2015-2018 he served as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Before that, he served as an honorary adviser to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. Among Professor Obstfeld's honors are the Frank Graham Lecture at Princeton, the inaugural Mundell-Fleming Lecture of the International Monetary Fund, the Bernhard Harms Prize and Lecture of the Kiel Institute for World Economy, the L. K. Jha Memorial Lecture at the Reserve Bank of India, and the Richard T. Ely Lecture of the American Economic Association. Professor Obstfeld is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is active as a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Most recently, he has joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, as a nonresident senior fellow.

Marc Melitz is the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He holds a BA from Haverford College (1989), an MSBA from the Robert Smith School of Business (1992), and a PhD from the University of Michigan (2000). He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), CESifo, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. His broad research interests are in international trade and investment. More specifically, he studies producer-level responses to globalisation and their implications for aggregate trade and investment patterns. His research has been funded by the Sloan Foundation and by the NSF.