Norman Loayza is Director of the Global Indicators Group at the World Bank. He has researched various areas of economic and social development, including macroeconomic management, economic growth, and public and private savings. Dr. Loayza has a long history of research on informality.

Nora Lustig is professor of Latin American Economics and Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute at Tulane University. Professor Lustig is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and at the Inter-American Dialogue. Her research is on economic development, inequality, and social policies with emphasis on Latin America.

Gabriel Ulyssea is an associate professor in the economics department at University College London. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. His research interests include economic development and labor economics. His current research focuses on informality, the implications of labor legislation and trade on the labor market, and the role of businesses in economic development.

Friedrich Schneider is a retired professor of Economics from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Prof. Schneider has published 82 books, 238 articles in refereed scientific journals, and 196 articles in edited volumes. His research interests include Public Finance, Public Choice, and Environmental Economics. He specialized in the fields of shadow/informal economy, tax evasion, organized crime, and the finances of terrorist organizations.

Rodrigo R. Soares is Lemann Professor of Brazilian Public Policy and International and Public Affairs and Affiliated Professor of Economics at Columbia University. His research centers on development economics, ranging from health and demographic economics, to crime, labor economics, and history and institutions. His work has appeared in various scientific journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Development Economics, among various others. Before joining Columbia, Rodrigo taught at the Sao Paulo School of Economics-FGV, PUC-Rio, the University of Maryland, and the Harvard School of Public Health.

In 2006, he was awarded the Kenneth J. Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for the best paper published in the field of Health Economics. Rodrigo is research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Germany), research affiliate at J-PAL Latin America, and associate editor of the Journal of Human Capital, of the Journal of Demographic Economics, and of the IZA Journal of Development & Migration. He is also an honorary member of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association. Rodrigo has acted as a consultant for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and state governments in Brazil on issues related to crime and violence, health, and development. He received his PhD in Economics under the guidance of Gary S. Becker at the University of Chicago in 2002.