RUDI DORNBUSCH (1942–2002) was Ford Professor of Economics and International Management at MIT. He did his undergraduate work in Switzerland and held a PhD from the University of Chicago. He taught at Chicago, at Rochester, and from 1975 to 2002 at MIT. His research was primarily in international economics, with a major macroeconomic component. His special research interests included the behavior of exchange rates, high inflation and hyperinflation, and the problems and opportunities that high capital mobility pose for developing economies. He lectured extensively in Europe and in Latin America, where he took an active interest in problems of stabilization policy, and held visiting appointments in Brazil and Argentina. His writing includes Open Economy Macroeconomics and, with Stanley Fischer and Richard Schmalensee, Economics.

STANLEY FISCHER is governor of the Bank of Israel. Previously he was vice chairman of Citigroup and president of Citigroup International, and from 1994 to 2002 he was first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. He was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and has a PhD from MIT. He taught at the University of Chicago while Rudi Dornbusch was a student there, starting a long friendship and collaboration. He was a member of the faculty of the MIT Economics Department from 1973 to 1998. From 1988 to 1990 he was chief economist at the World Bank. His main research interests are economic growth and development; international economics and macroeconomics, particularly inflation and its stabilization; and the economics of transition. http://www.iie.com/fischer

RICHARD STARTZ is Castor Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. He was an undergraduate at Yale University and received his PhD from MIT, where he studied under Stanley Fischer and Rudi Dornbusch. He taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before moving on to the University of Washington, and he has taught, while on leave, at the University of California–San Diego, the Stanford Business School, and Princeton. His principal research areas are macroeconomics, econometrics, and the economics of race. In the area of macroeconomics, much of his work has concentrated on the microeconomic underpinnings of macroeconomic theory. His work on race is part of a long-standing collaboration with Shelly Lundberg. http://www.econ.washington.edu/user/startz