David Hémous received his PhD from Harvard University in 2012. He is a macroeconomist working on economic growth, climate change and inequality. His work highlights that innovation responds to economic incentives and that public policies should be designed taking this dependence into account. In particular, he has shown in the context of climate change policy that innovations in the car industry respond to gas prices and that global and regional climate policies should support clean innovation to efficiently reduce CO2 emissions. His work on technological change and income distribution shows that higher labor costs lead to more automation, and that the recent increase in labor income inequality and in the capital share can be explained by a secular increase in automation. He has also shown that innovation affects top income shares. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on 'Automation and Income Distribution – a Quantitative Assessment' and he received the 2022 'European Award for Researchers in Environmental Economics under the Age of Forty'.

Dina Pomeranz received her PhD from Harvard in 2010. Prior to joining the University of Zurich, she was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT's Poverty Action Lab. Her research focuses on developing countries, in particular on public finance, taxation, public procurement and firm development. Taking state-capacity research to the field, she works closely with the governments in Chile, Ecuador and Kenya to analyze strategies to strengthen public finance capabilities, and measure the impacts on government agencies, citizens and firms. Her work has been published in academic journals including the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal - Applied Economics, and the Journal of Economic Development. In 2017, she was awarded one of the highly competitive ERC Starting Grants for her research on tax evasion and the role of firm networks. In 2018, she received the Excellence Prize in Applied Development Research of the “Verein für Socialpolitik”, was named as one of the top 10 most influential economists in Switzerland by a consortium of Swiss newspapers and was elected to the Council of the European Economic Association for a 5-year term.

Florian Scheuer promovierte 2010 am MIT. Er interessiert sich für die politischen Implikationen zunehmender Ungleichheit mit Schwerpunkt Steuerpolitik. Insbesondere hat er daran gearbeitet, wichtige Merkmale der realen Arbeitsmärkte in die Gestaltung optimaler Einkommens- und Vermögenssteuern einzubeziehen. Dazu gehören Volkswirtschaften mit Rentensuche, Superstar-Effekten oder einem wichtigen Unternehmenssektor, reibungslose Finanzmärkte sowie politische Einschränkungen der Steuerpolitik und die daraus resultierende Ungleichheit. Seine Arbeiten wurden unter anderem im American Economic Review, im Journal of Political Economy, im Quarterly Journal of Economics und im Review of Economic Studies veröffentlicht. 2017 erhielt er ein ERC-Startstipendium für seine Forschung zu „Ungleichheit - öffentliche Ordnung und politische Ökonomie“. Bevor er nach Zürich kam, war er an der Fakultät in Stanford, hatte Gastpositionen bei Harvard und UC Berkeley inne und war National Fellow an der Hoover Institution. Er ist Mitherausgeber von Theoretical Economics und Mitglied des Herausgebergremiums der Review of Economic Studies. Er ist ausserdem Co-Direktor der Arbeitsgruppe für Macro Public Finance bei der NBER. Er hat die Steuerpolitik in verschiedenen US- und Schweizer Medien kommentiert.

Joachim Voth received his PhD from Oxford in 1996. He works on financial crises, long-run growth, as well as on the origins of political extremism. He has examined public debt dynamics and bank lending to the first serial defaulter in history, analysed risk-taking behaviour by lenders as a result of personal shocks, and the investor performance during speculative bubbles. Joachim has also examined the deep historical roots of anti-Semitism, showing that the same cities where pogroms occurred in the Middle Age also persecuted Jews more in the 1930s; he has analyzed the extent to which schooling can create radical racial stereotypes over the long run, and how dense social networks (“social capital”) facilitated the spread of the Nazi party. In his work on long-run growth, he has investigated the effects of fertility restriction, the role of warfare, and the importance of state capacity. Joachim has published more than 80 academic articles and 3 academic books, 5 trade books and more than 50 newspaper columns, op-eds and book reviews. His research has been highlighted in The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, El Pais, Vanguardia, La Repubblica, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, NZZ, der Standard, der Spiegel, CNN, RTN, Swiss and German TV and radio.