Kenneth S Rogoff teaches in the Economics Department of Harvard University where he is Thomas D Cabot Professor of Public Policy.During 2001-2003 Rogoff was chief economist at the Internatonal Monetary Fund. His newest book The Curse of Cash, shows why phasing out most (except for small bills) would likely significantly reduce crime and tax evasion, while also helping central banks fight financial crises. His 2009 book, with Professor Carmen M Reinhart of the University of Maryland, was a NY Times and Amazon best seller; it exploits an extensive new database, developed by the authors over many years, and now widely used by researchers, policymakers and investor. Reinhart and Rogoff show the remarkable quantitative similarities in deep financial crises across time and regions. Rogoff's 1996 treatise with Maurice Obstfeld on the Foundations of International Macroeconomics remains the standard graduate reference in the field. His monthly column on global economic issues is published in over fifty countries and a dozen languages. He is also a frequent commentator in the media, including NPR, BBC, The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC and Bloomberg.

Outside economics, Rogoff was awarded the life title of international grandmaster of chess by the World Chess Federation in 1978. He is married to Natasha Lance Rogoff, and has two children, Gabriel and Juliana.

Carmen M. Reinhart is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s, where she became interested in financial crises, international contagion and commodity price cycles. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards, panels, and has testified before congress. She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade including: international capital flows, exchange rates, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises for over a decade. In the early 1990s, she wrote (with Guillermo Calvo) about the fickleness of capital flows to emerging markets and the likelihood of abrupt reversals--before the Mexican crisis of 1994-1995. Prior to the Asian crisis (1997-1998), she documented (with Graciela Kaminsky) the international historical links between asset price bubbles and banking crises, and how the latter could lead to currency crashes creating a "twin crisis." She identified (with Ken Rogoff) the possibility of severe economic dislocations from the sub-prime crisis in 2007. Her work is frequently featured in the financial press around the world, including The Economist, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She has appeared in CNN, CSPAN, BBC, and NPR, among others.

Her latest book (with Kenneth Rogoff) entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton Press) documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history.