Tarun Ramadorai is Professor of Financial Economics at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His main areas of research interest are asset pricing, international finance, household finance, and the Indian economy. Tarun is an Executive Committee member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, a Senior Academic Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research (ABFER) and also a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). He has served as an Economic Advisor to the European Securities and Markets Authority, as Honorary Advisor to the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi, and during 2011 and 2012, he was Visiting Scholar at the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. He has a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Williams College, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University.
Rajnish Mehra holds the E.N. Basha Arizona Heritage Chair at W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. He is also the Deutsche Bank Luxembourg Visiting Professor of Finance, Luxembourg School of Finance and a Research Associate at NBER. His research interests focus on capital markets, asset pricing and growth theory. He is the author of the Handbook of the Equity Risk Premium. Rajnish Mehra has a PhD in Finance from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Ravi Kanbur is the T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Prior to this he has served on the senior staff of the World Bank, including as Resident Representative in Ghana, Chief Economist of the African Region, and Principal Adviser to the Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has also served as Director of the World Bank’s World Development Report. Kanbur is also President-Elect of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, Past-President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Chair of the Board of UNU-WIDER, Co-Chair of the Scientific Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, member of the High Level Advisory Council of the Climate Justice Dialogue, member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance, and a member of the Core Group of the Commission on Global Poverty. His main areas of interest are public economics, development economics and economic theory. He has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Essex, Warwick, Princeton and Columbia.
He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford.
Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is also Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies.Prior to this, he was Chief Economist of the Department of International Development (DFID), the government department in charge with the UK’s aid policy and spending. In this position, he provided strategic advice, and was responsible for ensuring the use of evidence in decision making. He has held positions at the University of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), the Catholic University of Leuven, and WIDER (Helsinki), part of the United Nations University.
His research interests concern what keeps some people and countries poor: the failures of markets, governments and politics, mainly in Africa, and how to achieve change. Current research work focuses on the psychological challenges of poverty, the political economy of development, the challenges of industrialisation in Africa, the challenges and opportunities of new technologies, and how to organise and finance responses to natural disasters and protracted humanitarian crises. In 2018, the Queen awarded him as an honorary Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for services to economics and international development. Dercon received his PhD in Economics from Oxford University.
Sonalde Desai (Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director, NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre, New Delhi) is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social transformation and its impact on the lives of individuals with a focus on education, employment, gender, and maternal and child health.
She leads the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) of over 40,000 households, one of the few national panel surveys in India providing a rich and free public resource for studying the transformation of the Indian society in the 21st century between 2004 and 2024. Desai has published extensively in Indian and international journals and served on editorial boards of several major journals. She is a frequent contributor to Indian English language newspapers.
Desai received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and post-doctoral training at the University of Chicago and RAND Corporation. Desai was elected President of Population Association of America for 2022 and has been named a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
