Laura ALFARO, Harvard Business School
Laura Alfaro is the Chief Economist for the Inter-American Development Bank and Economic Counselor to the President. She is taking a leave from Harvard Business School, where she is the Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration. She served as Minister of National Planning and Economic Policy in Costa Rica from 2010 to 2012. She is Co-Editor of the Journal of International Economics and World Bank Research Observer, Vice-President of LACEA, and Faculty Research Associate in CEPR and NBER. Professor Alfaro has authored numerous articles on international economics, capital flows, foreign direct investment (FDI), sovereign debt, and trade. Laura Alfaro earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where she received the Dissertation Fellowship award. She received a B.A. degree in economics from the Universidad de Costa Rica and a 'Licenciatura' from the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Chile.

Giancarlo CORSETTI, European University Institute
Giancarlo Corsetti, (Ph.D. Yale) is a joint Professor at the Department of Economics and Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. Previously he was Professor of Macroeconomics at the Universities of Cambridge. He has been a long-serving consultant to the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Italy, the United Nations and other institutions. As fellow of CERP, he is currently leading the Research and Policy Network “European Economic Policy”. He is a fellow of the British Academy. His academic work includes pioneering research on open macro macroeconomics, fiscal and monetary policy, and currency and financial crises---published by leading international journals. He co-authored books and policy reports on European integration, stabilization policy and global monetary cooperation.

Paolo SODINI, Stockholm School of Economics
Paolo Sodini is the 25th Anniversary Professor at the Department of Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). Prof. Sodini obtained his PhD in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a research fellow of the Swedish House of Finance (SHOF), a research fellow at the CEPR, and one of the founding members of the CEPR Network in Household Finance. He is the director of MiDa – the Institute for Micro Data at SSE and SHoF. Prof. Sodini is a leading scholar in household finance, the field of Financial Economics that studies how households use financial markets to achieve their goals. He has studied the welfare consequences of household financial mistakes, such as portfolio diversification and rebalancing, and the importance of sophistication in limiting financial losses. He has also worked on the determinants of welfare inequality, in particular of the role of savings, preferences and returns to wealth. His latest research focuses on real estate markets and explores the impact of homeownership on household economic behavior and gender differences in the housing market. He published in top economics and finance journals such as: Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and has contributed to the latest edition of the Handbook of the Economics of Finance with a review chapter on Household Finance.