Simon Bornschier is the director of the research area political sociology at the department of political science of the university of Zurich. His research focuses on the formation and transformation of cleavages and party systems in Western Europe and South America, as well as the quality of representation.

Anne Ardila Brenøe is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Research Director of the LRF Center for Economics of Breastfeeding at the University of Zurich. Her primary research interests are in applied microeconomics. In particular, she is interested in labor economics, economics of education, and child development.

Marcel Caesmann holds a BA in Sociology, Politics and Economics from the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen and an MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2020, he joined the Department of Economics’ Zurich Graduate School of Economics. Marcel is currently a visiting PhD Researcher at UC Berkeley. His research interests lie in Economic History, Political Economy, and Cultural Economics.

Bruno Caprettini is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich. He works on economic history and development economics. In August 2017, he received an SNF Ambizione grant for the project “Structural change- lessons from the present and from the past.” Structural change is the movement of labor out of agriculture. In his research, he studies episodes of structural change that happened in the past or in recent years.

Lorenzo Casaburi is UBS Foundation Associate Professor of Development Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Zurich. His main line of research focuses on agricultural markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on market structure, behavioral insights, and agricultural finance. He also works on state capacity, with an emphasis on tax enforcement and redistribution policies. For his research, he has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant), the Swiss National Foundation (Eccellenza Grant), USAID, and DFID, among others. Lorenzo holds a B.A. from the University of Bologna and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. Before joining Zurich, he was a postdoc at Stanford SIEPR. He is a Research Fellow at CEPR and a Research Affiliate at BREAD, IGC, IPA, and J-PAL.

Gregory Crawford is a Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich, specializing in the fields of industrial organization, antitrust and competition policy, and media economics. His research interests include antitrust and regulation, digital platforms, vertical integration and foreclosure, bargaining, public-service broadcasting, advertising, and empirical methods for analyzing these topics. In 2007 and 2008, he was Chief Economist at the Federal Communication Commission. Greg was co-Director of the Industrial Organization Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research from 2014 to 2022. He is the co-founder and was the first director of the CEPR Research and Policy Network on Competition Policy. He joined Zalando in 2022 as their inaugural Chief Economist to expand the role of economics and economists in their business.

David Dorn is the UBS Foundation Professor of Globalization and Labor Markets at the University of Zurich and the director of the university-wide interdisciplinary research priority program “Equality of Opportunity.” He was previously a tenured associate professor at CEMFI in Madrid, a visiting professor at the University of California in Berkeley, and a visiting professor at Harvard University.Professor Dorn’s research spans the fields of labor economics, international trade, economic geography, macroeconomics, and political economy. He published influential studies on the impacts of globalization and technological innovation on labor markets and society. David Dorn is among the 100 most highly cited economists worldwide in the last decade. In 2023, he was awarded the Hermann Heinrich Gossen Prize for the most accomplished economist in German-speaking countries under the age of 45.

Jan Eeckhout is ICREA professor of Economics at UPF Barcelona. He is the author of the book The Pofit Paradox. He studies the macroeconomic implications of market power, and the economics of work. His research has featured in the media, including The Economist, WSJ, FT, NYT and Bloomberg. He has been tenured professor at the UPenn and UCL and has been Louis Simpson Visiting Professor at Princeton. He is fellow of the Econometric Society, EEA, and Academia Europaea.

Ernst Fehr received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1986. His work has shown how social motives shape the cooperation, negotiations and coordination among actors and how this affects the functioning of incentives, markets and organisations. His work identifies important conditions under which cooperation flourishes and breaks down. The work on the psychological foundations of incentives informs us about the merits and the limits of financial incentives for the compensation of employees. In other work he has shown the importance of corporate culture for the performance of firms. In more recent work he shows how social motives affect how people vote on issues related to the redistribution of incomes and how differences in people’s intrinsic patience is related to wealth inequality. His work has found large resonance inside and outside academia with more than 100’000 Google Scholar citations and his work has been mentioned many times in international and national newspapers.

Prof. Reto Föllmi ist Professor für Internationale Ökonomie sowie Direktor des SIAW-HSG an der Universität St. Gallen. Er ist Mitglied des Ausschusses für Makroökonomie des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Research Affiliate am Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) und Mitglied der Programmkommission von Avenir Suisse. Das Forschungsinteresse von Prof. Dr. Reto Föllmi richtet sich auf die Gebiete Makroökonomik, Internationaler Handel, Wachstum und Industrielle Organisation. Insbesondere forscht er in den Bereichen der Handelspolitik und der Einkommensungleichheiten.

Silja Häusermann is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where she teaches classes on Swiss politics, comparative political economy, comparative politics and welfare state research. Her research interests are in comparative politics and comparative political economy.

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'.

Nir Jaimovich received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2004. He works on macroeconomics questions with special emphasis on business cycles, labor markets, and the macroeconomic implications of micro product level data and was head of the NBER price dynamics group (together with Bob Hall). Within these research areas, he combines new data and quantitative theories to tackle long-standing macroeconomic questions. In the area of labor/macro his work shows how demographic composition and occupation structure of the economy shape the dynamics of the business cycle. In addition, his work examines the empirical and theoretical plausibility of signals and uncertainty about future economic fundamentals functioning as important drivers of business cycles. Finally, his micro-pricing product-level data shows how actual firms’ pricing strategies shapes the insights regarding the extent that monetary policy has an impact on the economy. His work has found large resonance inside and outside academia and was featured within policy circles (such as White House official publications) and media outlets such The New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Forbes, Swiss and German media.

Martínez is an Economist working on topics around the distribution of income and wealth, how we tax these things, and how people’s behavior responds to taxes. Since April 2020, she has been holding a research position at KOF Institute at ETH Zurich. During the Fall term 2021/22, she was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a CEPR Research Affiliate, a Fellow of the World Inequality Database Project (WID.world) and of the SIAW Institute at the University of St.Gallen, where she completed her PhD in 2016. From fall 2017 until spring 2020 she worked as an economist for the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions SGB-USS. Since 2018, Martínez represents the trade unions in the Swiss Competition Commission as an elected Member of the Commission.

Prof Mueller’s research spans a broad spectrum of issues in macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics and has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies and covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. He is a Faculty Research Associate at NBER, a Research Affiliate at CEPR, a Research Fellow at IZA, an Associate Editor at the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES) and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics (JME). Prior to joining the University of Zurich, he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at UT Austin and at Columbia Business School. Prof. Mueller received his doctorate from the IIES, Stockholm University, and was awarded the Arnbergska Prize for his dissertation work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

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.

Dominic Rohner is Professor of Economics at the University of Lausanne. His research focuses on topics related to development, civil conflict and political economics.

Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than 100 journal articles, books, and book chapters, and has focused in particular on the impact of culture and political institutions on the prosperity of countries. A native of Belgium, he is intimately familiar with the challenges of small nations and federalism. In his presentation, he will focus on the rise of China and the changing world order. Professor Roland has worked as a consultant for the IMF, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Commission and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Florian Scheuer received his PhD from MIT in 2010. He is interested in the policy implications of rising inequality, with a focus on tax policy. In particular, he has worked on incorporating important features of real-world labor markets into the design of optimal income and wealth taxes. These include economies with rent-seeking, superstar effects or an important entrepreneurial sector, frictional financial markets, as well as political constraints on tax policy and the resulting inequality. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies, among other journals. In 2017, he received an ERC starting grant for his research on “Inequality - Public Policy and Political Economy.” Before joining Zurich, he was on the faculty at Stanford, held visiting positions at Harvard and UC Berkeley and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is Co-Editor of Theoretical Economics and Member of the Board of Editors of the Review of Economic Studies. He is also a Co-Director of the working group on Macro Public Finance at the NBER. He has commented on tax policy in various US and Swiss media outlets.

Kjetil Storesletten is Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on heterogeneity in macroeconomics and development, in particular the impact of risk on economic allocations and the economic transformation of China. In 2013, he was awarded the Sun Yefang prize by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (with Song and Zilibotti).

Kaspar Villiger is a Swiss businessman, politician and former member of the Swiss Federal Council (1989 – 2003), serving first as Minister of Defence and then as Minister of Finance. He was President of the Confederation twice, in 1995 and again in 2002. On April 15, 2009, he was elected Chairman of the Board of UBS, holding this post until May 3, 2012. Villiger is a member of the Global Leadership Foundation, an organization which works to promote good governance around the world. In 2012 he became Chairman of the new UBS Foundation of Economics in Society.

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.

Roberto Weber is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich. His research and teaching falls primarily within the areas of behavioral and experimental economics, decision making, and the study of organizations and institutions.

David Yanagizawa-Drott received his PhD from IIES at Stockholm University in 2010. At that point, he was hired as Assistant Professor at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He was then promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. In 2016, he was hired as a full professor at University of Zürich. His research has shown that propaganda can cause violent conflict, studying the impact of hate media during the Rwanda Genocide. David has also examined the role of political protests in shaping policy outcomes and elections, establishing evidence that they can be highly effective in moving public opinion. In developing countries, a lot of his work focuses on the how to improve health outcomes and economic outcomes for poor households. In this line of work, for example, David implemented a randomized field experiment that showed that a simple Community Health Worker intervention in Uganda, based on a social entrepreneurship model, reduced child mortality by more than twenty percent. David is a member of several research networks, such as Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), European Development Research Network (EUDN) and Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His work has been highlighted in various international media outlets, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist and various national TV news broadcasts in the U.S.

Fabrizio Zilibotti is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. He was Professor of Macroeconomics and Political Economy at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich and both Scientific Director and Deputy Director of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society. He is the President of the European Economic Association and co-editor at Econometrica. His research interests include economic growth and development, political economy, macro-economics, financial economics, and the Chinese economy.

Josef Zweimüller is a Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich. His research interests are growth and inequality and the effects welfare state programs on the labor market.