Diego Puga is Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales (the Social Sciences Division of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies). His main research areas are urban economics and international trade. In particular, his research has dealt with such issues as what makes firms and workers more productive in large cities; the role that diverse metropolis play in fostering innovation; the causes and consequences of urban sprawl; how regional inequalities evolve with economic integration, and the transformation of world trade patterns following the rise of incremental innovation in some low-wage countries. He is also studying interactions between geography, institutions and economic development in the context of, for instance, the slave trades in Africa or international trade in medieval Venice. His publications include articles in American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of International Economics and Journal of Urban Economics and have been cited over 600 times in articles published by journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Born in Spain, where he graduated in Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Professor Puga obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1997. He has held full-time academic positions at the London School of Economics (as Lecturer in Economics and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance), the University of Toronto (as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and then as tenured Associate Professor of Economics), and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (as Visiting Professor of Economics). In addition to those institutions, he has also taught at Northwestern University, Norges Handelshøyskole, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Università Bocconi. In 2000, Dr Puga was awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize, and in 2005 the Geoffrey J. D. Hewings Award, given by the North American Regional Science Council for distinguished contributions to research in regional science. Professor Puga is also Director of the International Trade and Regional Economics Programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the leading European research network in Economics. He served as Editor of the Journal of Economic Geography from 2003 to 2007, during which term this publication achieved the third highest impact factor of all journals in Economics and the first in Geography. He has advised the European Commission, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank on topics related to his research.

José M. Marín is a Finance Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales (the Social Sciences Division of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies). His main areas of research are asset management and asset pricing. In particular, his current research agenda focuses on the study of market crashes, insider trading, the anomalies in the valuation of companies sponsoring defined benefit pension plans, and the development of successful trading strategies that build on several sources of misspricing in financial markets. His research output has had a significant impact on financial regulation and among practitioners. For instance, recent reforms in the regulatory framework (Pension Protection Act 2006) and accounting rules (SFAS 158) related to the U.S. Pension System have been partially motivated by Dr Marín’s findings, and his research on pricing anomalies and market crashes has received ample coverage in the professional media. Dr Marín’s publications include articles in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Portfolio Management, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics and Economic Theory, among others. He has also contributed chapters in collective books and monographs, and is author of Economía Financiera, a textbook that is widely used as a reference in undergraduate and graduate programs worldwide. Born in Spain, he graduated Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude (Premio Extraordinario) from the University of Murcia (Spain) with a degree in Economics, and received his PhD in the same subject from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining IMDEA, Dr Marín was a tenured professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and has also held academic positions at the Wharton School (Fulbright Senior Visiting Scholar) and New York University (MEC Visiting Scholar). He has visited and taught courses at several other institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad del Pacífico. He has served as President of the Spanish Finance Association (2004 to 2006), Director of the Centre for Research in Financial Economics (2004-2007) and Vice-Dean of the Economics and Business School at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Dr Marín has participated as a member or leading researcher in nine research grants (sponsored by either private foundations or government agencies) worth over half a million euros. Outside the academic world he has worked as senior consultant for Quantitative Financial Strategies, Inc. (QFS) and its affiliate Grossman Asset Management, LP; the European Central Bank (ECB); the European Investment Bank (EIB), and several firms managing mutual and pension funds.

Andres Erosa will become Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales on July 1, 2008. Currently, he is professor of economics at the University of Toronto. His research covers a number of fields in the area of Macroeconomics. In Monetary Theory, this includes the analysis of private money and the study of the distributive effects of monetary policies; in Public Finance, the analysis of the effects of capital gains taxation on business turnover, the study of how the government should set taxes optimally, and the evaluation of the aggregate and distributive effects of fiscal policies; in Economic Development, he has studied the consequences of capital market imperfections for entrepreneurship and aggregate total factor productivity in the economy; in Labor Economics, he has documented empirical regularities on labor supply and developed theories aimed at understanding gender differences in wages. Dr Erosa’s research has been published in leading international academic journals including the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Dynamics, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the International Economic Review, and Economic Theory, among others. He has been invited to present his work at leading academic institutions in Europe and North America, and his work has been included in the agenda of the most prestigious academic meetings in economics. Professor Erosa has supervised numerous Ph.D. students in the area of Macroeconomics and their doctoral dissertations led to publications in leading academic journals. His doctoral students have been placed at such prestigious institutions as the University of Pennsylvania, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and the University of Toronto, among others. He has directed and participated in several research projects sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Spanish Ministry of Education and the BBVA Foundation, among others. Born in Uruguay, where he completed his undergraduate degree in Economics, Dr Erosa earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1996. A Fulbright Fellow, he was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Sloan Foundation. Over the course of his career, he has received several distinctions for his teaching and received the Dean’s Merit award for his contributions to the Economics Department at the University of Toronto during the period 2006-2007. From 2002 to 2004 he served as an associate Editor of the Spanish Economic Review.

Nuno Garoupa is Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales (the Social Sciences Division of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies) and Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. His main research areas are law and economics and empirical legal studies. In particular, his research includes issues such as the organization and performance of the judiciary and of prosecutors, regulation of legal services, efficient law enforcement (including criminal and civil procedure), legal reform, and law and politics. Professor Garoupa’s long established research interest in the economics of law and legal institutions has been published in the most prestigious journals in the field, including the Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Economics; Journal of Law, Economics and Organization; Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, American Law and Economics Review, Supreme Court Economic Review as well as the Economic Journal and the European Economic Review, among others. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, where he completed his undergraduate degree in Economics (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1992), Professor Garoupa obtained his M.Sc. in Economics from the QueenMaryCollege in 1994 and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of York in 1998. Professor Garoupa also holds a LLM in Criminology and Criminal Justice (University of London, 2005). He has held fulltime academic positions at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (as Assistant and later tenured Associate Professor) and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (as tenured Associate and later Full Professor). In addition to these institutions, he has also taught at George Mason University School of Law, Tinbergen Institute in Amsterdam, and University of Manchester School of Law. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University School of Law (John M. Olin Fellow), Stanford University School of Law, University of Berkeley School of Law and Amsterdam University Centre for Law and Economics. Professor Garoupa has served as Vice-President of the European Association of Law and Economics (from 2004 to 2007); currently he serves as member of the Board of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (until Summer 2009), and as editor of the Review of Law and Economics. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of the International Review of Law and Economics, the Portuguese Economic Journal, and the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of Legal Studies. Professor Garoupa is a member of the Comparative Law and Economics Forum (CLEF). He is also a Research Affiliate of the CEPR (London) and a former Research Affiliate of FEDEA (Madrid).

Rickard F. Sandell is Senior Research Fellow at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales (the Social Sciences Division of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies). He specializes in Organizational Sociology, International Migration and Demographic Processes. He is particularly interested in the importance of social networks for people’s decision-making processes, and in how decisions concerning migration and demographic behavior are shaped by an individual’s position in his social network. His research on those topics has been published in leading international academic journals including, among others, the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, ACTA Sociologica, the European Sociological Review, the Scandinavian Journal of Management and Rationality and Society, as well as in two books and several book chapters and monographs. Dr Sandell is also an internationally recognized authority in Spanish immigration and demographic trends. His research in these areas has received ample coverage in the media. In particular, his work on international immigration in Spain is frequently cited in both Spanish and international media outlays, such as The Economist, The Washington Post and The International Herald Tribune, among others. Born in Danderyd, Sweden, he graduated from Stockholm University in 1993 with a degree in Sociology, majoring in Human Resource Development and Labor Relations. He received his Ph.D. from the same university in 1998. An International Research Fellow of the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, Dr Sandell has directed and participated in research projects sponsored by the Bank of Sweden’s Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has been an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University and a Visiting Professor at the Instituto Universitario de Estudios de Iberoamérica y Portugal at the University of Salamanca. From 2000 to 2003 he was head of the Council of Europe’s Population Division in Strasbourg, and Executive Secretary to the European Population Committee, where he was responsible for the Committee’s research projects as well as its well-known Recent Demographic Trends in Europe yearbook. Prior to joining IMDEA, Dr Sandell held the position of Senior Research Analyst at Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid, where he was responsible for the Institute’s Research Program in Demography, Population and International Migration.

Luisa Fuster will become Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales on July 1, 2008. She is currently a tenured Associate Professor of economics at the University of Toronto. Dr Fuster has also held full time Faculty positions at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (as an Assistant and later tenured Associate Professor) and at the University of Western Ontario. She earned her PhD in economics from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona in 1994 and subsequently was a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Professor Fuster’s research spans across fields, including macroeconomics, public finance and labor economics. It has dealt with such issues as the macroeconomic and distributive effects of government tax policies, the welfare consequences of the social security system, social security reform, and the effects of altruistic transfers and accidental bequests on capital accumulation and the distribution of wealth. Her recent research focuses on understanding gender differences in labor supply and wages. In particular, Dr Fuster has reported empirical regularities in gender differences in wages and has built a quantitative theory of labor supply and fertility decisions that is consistent with those observations. She has used this theory to analyze the impact of family policies on female labor supply and wages. She has also developed a theory for the observed positive correlation between fertility rates and female employment rates across OECD countries. Understanding the trend of fertility rates in developed countries is important for evaluating the sustainability of current social security arrangements. Professor Fuster’s work has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the International Economic Review, the Review of Economic Dynamics, and Economic Theory, among others. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Spanish Economic Review and was a member of the Editorial Board of Investigaciones Económicas, and has served as a referee for many prestigious international journals and for the National Science Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Professor Fuster has supervised a number of research projects that received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Foundation, the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. Her research has also received funding from the BBVA Foundation and the Ramon Areces Foundation. She is the recipient of various academic awards including a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Predoctoral Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the Dean’s Merit award for her contributions to the Economics Department at the University of Toronto during the period 2005-2006. In 2007 she passed her Habilitation Review before the Spanish Ministry of Education with the rank of Full Professor.

Roberto Serrano is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and Research Professor at IMDEA Social Sciences in Madrid, Spain. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Rationality of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and CEMFI. His fields of interest are micro-economics and game theory. He has made contributions to implementation theory and mechanism design, bargaining and auction theory, the economics of uncertainty and information, and the theory of general economic equilibrium. Dr Serrano received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1992. He also holds an MA in Economics from Harvard University and a BA in Economics from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Prof. Serrano has published one book and over forty articles in leading economics, game theory and applied mathematics journals, including Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, International Journal of Game Theory, and SIAM Review. He is currently or has been an Associate Editor of three economics journals: Economic Theory, Mathematical Social Sciences, and Research in Economics. He has also served as referee for many prestigious international journals, publishers and institutions. Prof. Serrano has given numerous invited lectures at the best economic and game theory seminars and international conferences. He also was the Chair of the Program Committee for the 2004 North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society. Dr Serrano is a Member of the Council of the Game Theory Society since 2005 and was one of its founding Charter Members in 1999. He has received a number of awards and prizes for his research, including the Fundación Banco Herrero Prize to the best Spanish economist under 40 in 2004, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship in 1998, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Merit Fellowship in 1991, and Prizes from Spain's National Organization for the Blind in 1993 and 1988. His research has been supported by grants from several institutions, including the US National Science Foundation, the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Fundación Ramón Areces, the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, and the Spanish Dirección General de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. He has taught Microeconomics, Game Theory, bargaining and auction theory, economics of uncertainty and information, industrial organization, the theory of contracts and Mathematical Economics at both graduate and undergraduate levels at Brown University, Universidad Carlos III, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Harvard University and Universidad Complutense. He has also supervised a dozen doctoral dissertations in these fields. Prof. Serrano received the William McLaughlin Award for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences at Brown University in 1999, and the Omicron-Delta-Epsilon Economics Professor of the Year Award in 2006. He lives in Barrington, Rhode Island, USA, with his wife Amy and their daughters Sofia and Elena.