Amar Bhidé is the Thomas Schmidheiny Professor of International Business at Tufts University, editor of Capitalism and Society, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy (Oxford, 2010), The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses (Oxford, 2000) and The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton, 2008). A former McKinsey & Company consultant, Bhidé was educated at the Indian Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, where he graduated as a Baker Scholar and later served as an associate professor.
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Patrick Bolton is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business, and Co-Director of the Center for Contracts and Economic Organization at the Columbia Law School. His areas of interest are in contracting issues in corporate finance and industrial organization. A central focus of his work is on the allocation of control and decision rights to contracting parties when long-term contracts are incomplete. This issue is relevant in many different contexts including: the firm’s choice of optimal debt structure, corporate governance, the boundaries of the firm, and constitution design. His work in industrial organization focuses on antitrust economics and the potential anticompetitive effects of various contracting practices. He recently published Contract Theory, MIT Press (2005), with Mathias Dewatripont and co-edited Credit Markets for the Poor, Russell Sage Foundation (2005), with Howard Rosenthal.
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Guillermo Calvo has been Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University since January 2007, and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic research (NBER). He is the former Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (2001-2006), President of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, LACEA (2000-2001), and President of the International Economic Association, IEA (2005-2008). He has advised several governments in Latin America and Eastern Europe and has testified before the U.S. Congress on dollarization and the 1994 Mexican crisis. His main field of expertise is macroeconomics of Emerging Market and Transition Economies and his recent work has dealt extensively with capital flows and balance-of-payments crises in Emerging Market Economies. His latest book, Emerging Capital Markets in Turmoil: Bad Luck or Bad Policy?, was published in 2005 by MIT Press.
Merritt Fox is the Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, NASDAQ Professor for the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, and Co-Director of the Center for Law and Economic Studies at the Columbia Law School. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and also received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale. Prior to entering academia, Professor Fox practiced with the New York City firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. His teaching and research have centered in the areas of corporate and securities law, law and economics, and international securities regulation and comparative corporate law. His recent work has focused on the regulation of corporate disclosure, the appropriate reach of U.S. securities regulation with respect to transnational transactions, reform of private securities litigation, and the impact of securities and corporate law on the level of innovation in the economy. Professor Fox is past chair of the Business Associations section of the American Association of Law Schools.
Roman Frydman, Professor of Economics at New York University since 1995, was one of the early critics of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH). In the 1983 volume, which he co-edited with Edmund Phelps (Individual Forecasting and Aggregate Outcomes: “Rational Expectations” Examined, Cambridge University Press), they showed that REH suffers from fundamental epistemological flaws. In the 1990s, Frydman collaborated with Andrzej Rapaczynski on a multi-country research and policy project on the "transition" in Eastern Europe. Their numerous books and articles are well-known for their breadth and insightful analysis. In recent years, Frydman has worked on a new approach to macroeconomic analysis that jettisons the Rational Expectations Hypothesis, and recognizes that, in making decisions, rational individuals must cope with imperfect knowledge. His path-breaking book with Michael Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics was published by Princeton University Press in 2007.
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R. Glenn Hubbard is Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance. He has done much-cited research on financial factors in corporate performance, including his influential work on the burdens of dividend taxation. From 2001 - 2003 he served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Richard Nelson heads the program on Science, Technology, and Global Development, at the Columbia Earth Institute, and is George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs, Business, and Law, at Columbia, Emeritus, and Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. He has served as research economist and analyst at the Rand Corporation, and at the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. His central interests have been in long-run economic change. Much of his research has been directed toward understanding technological change, how economic institutions and public policies influence the evolution of technology, and how technological change in turn induces institutional and economic change more broadly. Along with Sidney Winter, he has pioneered in trying to develop a way of economic theorizing that recognizes explicitly that the economy is almost always undergoing change, most of it unpredictable, and that theories that assume that economic agents understand well the context in which they are operating, and that the system is in equilibrium, are inadequate for analysis of many important economic questions. His book with Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change is widely recognized as a landmark in this field.
Edmund Phelps is the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics. His career began with a stint at the RAND Corporation. Back east in 1960, he held appointments at Yale and its Cowles Foundation until 1966, then a professorship for five years at Penn. In 1970 he moved to New York and joined Columbia in 1971. Phelps's work can be seen as a program to put "people as we know them" back into economic models - to take into account the incompleteness of their information and their knowledge and to study the effects of their expectations and beliefs on the workings of markets. He has adopted this perspective in studying unemployment and inclusion, economic growth, business swings and economic dynamism. Phelps was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Science in 1982 and made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000. In 2008 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and was awarded the Premio Pico della Mirandola for humanism and the Kiel Global Economy Prize. In the same year the University of Buenos Aires Law School established the Catedra Phelps for Programs on Dynamism and Inclusion. He also holds many honorary doctorates and several honorary professorships. An extraordinary tribute occurred when scholars came from around the world for a large Festschrift conference in his honor just three weeks after 9/11.
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Richard Robb is CEO of Christofferson, Robb and Company (CRC), a New York- and London-based fund management company that invests in asset backed securities and renewable energy assets in Europe and emerging markets. He is also Professor of Professional Practice in International Finance at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, where he teaches courses in microeconomics, economic foundations of capital markets and finance.
Before co-founding CRC, he was the global head of the derivatives and securities subsidiaries of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Ltd. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
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Jeffrey Sachs is Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Sachs is also Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her new books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007). She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers). The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into twenty-one languages. She has received several honors and awards, most recently a doctor honoris causa from each Delft University, DePaul University, and Universite de Poitiers. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council. She is the Chair of the new Urbanism competition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Newsweek International, among others, and contributes regularly to www.OpenDemocracy.net and www.HuffingtonPost.com.
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Winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic for his work on welfare economics, Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor. Born in Santiniketan, India, Amartya Sen is an Indian citizen. He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Lamont University Professor at Harvard also earlier, from1988–1998, and previous to that he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and a Fellow of All Souls College (he is now a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls). Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics.
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Richard Sennett trained at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then moved to New York where, in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work; he also taught occasionally at Harvard. In the mid 1990s Mr. Sennett began to divide his time between New York University and the London School of Economics . In addition to these academic homes, he maintains informal connections to MIT and to Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Mark C. Taylor is the Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. A leading figure in debates about post-modernism, Taylor has written on topics ranging from philosophy, religion, literature, art and architecture to education, media, science, technology and economics.
Taylor is also Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Union Theological Seminary and the Cluett Professor of Humanities, emeritus at Williams College. He received a Doktorgrad (Philosophy) from the University of Copenhagen in 1981, a Ph.D. in religion from Harvard in 1973, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1968. The many awards and honors he has received include: Wesleyan University Distinguished Alumnus Award (1998), Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Professor of the year (1995), Rektor’s Medal, University of Helsinki (1993), American Academy of Religion Awards for Excellence for his books Nots (1994),Altarity (1998) and After God (2008). He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979-80).
Sidney Winter is the Deloitte and Touche Professor of Management, Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His career has included a total of about eight years in policy research or government roles. The rest has been spent in academe, often with one foot in the economics department and the other in public policy or management. From the start, he has pursued a theoretical perspective on firm behavior that is more realistic than the neoclassical standard brand and also provides better foundations and stronger links to studies of innovation, organization and managerial practice. With Richard Nelson he developed the leading modern statement of an evolutionary view of economics, which in its firm-level aspects seems to meet the requirements just named. Outside of the domains of firm behavior and evolutionary theory, he has published on a variety of topics, ranging from general equilibrium theory to weather forecasting and beyond. In 2008 he became the fourth recipient of the Viipuri Prize in Strategic Management, awarded in Lappeenranta, Finland, and was named the Distinguished Lecturer of the Technology and Innovation Management division of the Academy of Management.