Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy earned his doctorate in Economics from the University of Houston and master’s degrees in Physics and Economics from Odessa National University and the Kyiv School of Economics/EERC, respectively. Alex currently holds the position of endowed Class ‘61 Associate Professor at Lehigh University. Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy’s papers have been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and others. He has been the recipient of several research grants and his research has been referred to at the U.S. Congress.

Tymofiy Mylovanov is the Honorary President of Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). He received his Master degree in Economics from the Kyiv School of Economics in 1999. Tymofiy Mylovanov earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2004 and has taught at the University of Bonn, Penn State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pittsburgh afterwards.

His research on game theory, contract theory, and institutional design has been published in major international academic journals. Tymofiy Mylovanov is a co-founder of VoxUkraine and has been a member of the academic advisory board of the KSE for several years. Since October 2016 – Deputy Chairman of the Council of the National Bank of Ukraine.

Jacek Suda is Economic Expert at Narodowy Bank Polski and Assistant Professor at the Warsaw School of Economics. He obtained his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis and his previous work experience includes Banque de France and Paris School of Economics, as well as short-term visiting position at Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Aix-Marseille School of Economics. His current research interest includes models of non-rational expectations and their application to real and financial cycles, as well as monetary policy. He has published in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and Economic Letters.

Volodymyr Vakhitov holds a position of a Senior Economist at KEI and Raiffeisen Bank Aval Professor at KSE for the current year. After joining KSE in 2008, Volodymyr was awarded several grants and fellowships from Global Development Network, Economic Education and Research Consortium, World Bank, and National Research University “Higher School of Economics” for his research of productivity of Ukrainian manufacturing firms.

He explores productivity effects of agglomeration economies, non-tariff measures, liberalization of services. He is also interested in Urban and Regional economics and Behavioral Economics and Finance. Volodymyr has a number of publications in academic journals, such as Journal of Comparative Economics and Economics of Transition.

Before founding OGResearch in 2009, David Vavra had worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Czech National Bank. When working for the IMF, he advised dozens of central banks and national authorities on monetary policy, helping them to move to flexible exchange rate regimes, to implement inflation targeting frameworks, and to tackle a host of monetary and fiscal policy issues.

David is also an expert in macroeconomic modeling and forecasting. He contributed to the development of forecasting and decision-making support systems in many central banks. As Managing Partner of OGResearch, David is responsible for marketing and strategic business development. David holds PhD in Economics from CERGE-EI.

Yakiv Smolii holds a position of Acting Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine since 11 May 2017. Before, he worked as First Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine since October 2016 and Deputy Governor of the NBU since April 2014. Member of the NBU Board since April 2014. Areas under his management: operational activity controls, payments, and cash circulation. Head of the NBU Committee on Banking Supervision and Regulation, and Payment System Oversight, Head of the NBU Operational Risks and Business Continuity Management Committee, Head of the NBU Change Management Committee.

Yakiv Smolii has been working in the banking system of Ukraine since 1991, when he joined NBU Regional Office in Ternopil oblast. In 1994-2005, he was Deputy Chairman of the Board of Joint Stock Post & Pension Bank Aval. In 2005-2014, held the office of Banking Business Director at Prestige-Group. Has a PhD in Economics.

Anna Trzecińska is a graduate of the Production Economics Department at the Main School of Planning and Statistics. In October 1983 she joined Narodowy Bank Polski (NBP). In 1993 she was appointed as Deputy Director of the Monetary and Credit Policy Department, in 1998 she advanced to the position of Director. She was responsible for the development of monetary policy instruments, and supervised public debt servicing, financial stability and FX policy issues. She was NBP Representative at the Market Operations Committee of the European Central Bank.

Since June 2005 Ms Trzecińska – Member of the NBP Management Board. Since January 2009 – Executive Director of PKO Bank Polski. Since November 2009 – Deputy President of the Bank Guarantee Fund (BFG). Since 2014 – Vice President of NBP.

Dr Gianluca Benigno is tenured Professor in the Department of Economics at LSE. He gained his PhD in International Macroeconomics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Gianluca Benigno’s research interests include International Macroeconomics, International Finance, and Monetary Economics. More recently his research agenda has focused on the issues related to secular stagnation. Dr Benigno has consulted for the Bank of England, IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank and the New Zealand Treasury. He was previously a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an economist at the Bank of England and visiting scholar at the ECB.

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a native of Ukraine, is an associate professor at the Department of Economics, University of California – Berkeley. He received his B.A. and MA at EERC/ Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine) and his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.

A significant part of his research has been about monetary policy, fiscal policy, taxation, economic growth, and business cycles. Yuriy serves on many editorial boards (Review of Economics & Statistics, VoxUkraine). His work was published in leading economics journals (e.g., American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies) and was cited in policy discussions and media.

RePEc ranks Yuriy as #1 young economist in the world.

Marcin Kolasa is Deputy Director of the Department of Economic Research of Narodowy Bank Polski and Associate Professor at the Warsaw School of Economics. He worked in the European Central Bank. Member of the editorial board of the Bank and Credit and Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics. His current research interest cover monetary policy, international economics, financial frictions, and forecasting. He has published i.a. in the Journal of International Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Economic Surveys and Journal of International Money and Finance.

Professor Erik Berglof is the inaugural Director of the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The IGA, its Global Policy Lab and eight constituent centers bring together LSE faculty and students from across departments to design research-based and locally rooted solutions to global challenges.

Prior to joining the LSE, Professor Berglof was the Chief Economist and Special Adviser to the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Previously, he was Director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) and Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He was Assistant Professor at Universite Libre de Bruxelles. He has also served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Sweden.

Gérard Roland is the E. Morris Cox professor of economics and professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley where he has been since 2001. He was the chair of the economics department between 2008 and 2011. In 1998-1999, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences in Stanford.

He is the author of over 150 journal articles, chapters in books, and books. His researches focused on transition economies since the early nineties, covering mainly political economy aspects of transition but also financial reform, privatization, restructuring and macroeconomic issues. He has also made intellectual contributions to debates on the institutional structure of the European Union.

Faruk Khan has been appointed Lead Economist and Program Leader covering Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as of December 1, 2015. He will be responsible for the areas of macroeconomics and fiscal management, finance, governance, private sector, and poverty. Faruk replaces Lalita Moorty in this position.

Faruk has extensive experience in leading the World Bank’s economic policy work in a number of countries. Most recently, he was the Lead Economist and Sector Leader for Afghanistan through a rapidly evolving economic, political, and security transition. Previously, he was Senior Economist for Georgia after the dual shocks of the August 2008 war with Russia and the global financial crisis. He has also worked on Albania, Bangladesh, Kyrgyz Republic, and Russia, and was co-author of the World Bank’s report on “Unleashing Prosperity” for the Europe and Central Asia region. Prior to joining the World Bank through the Young Professionals Program in 2005, Faruk was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College and a Visiting Scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

Kerstin af Jochnick has been First Deputy Governor of the Riksbank since January 2012. Her current international assignments include the Basel Committee and the General Board of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB).

Kerstin af Jochnick has previously been Managing Director of the Swedish Bankers’ Association, which is a lobby organization for banks with activities in Sweden. She has also been Chair of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors as well as Head of Department at Finansinspektionen (the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority) responsible for banking and financial stability supervision.

Vadym Volosovych is an Associate professor of international finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Houston (USA) in 2006 and worked as an Assistant professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University (USA).

His research is broadly on international macro-finance, focusing in particular on understanding the patterns of international investments, the effects and explanations of economic integration on macro and micro level. In the past, he has been a visiting scholar at the research department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. and earlier worked as a research associate at the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting in Kyiv.

Oleg Itskhoki is a Professor in the Department of Economics and at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, as well as the Richard Allen Lester University Preceptor and a Sloan Research Fellow.

His research interests are in the fields of Macroeconomics and International Economics. One line of his research focuses on the effects of globalization on labor markets, in particular unemployment and income inequality. Another line studies the pricing policies of firms in international transaction. His most recent research covers the issue of optimal macroeconomic policies in currency unions and optimal development and industrial policies in economies with financial frictions. The research was supported by The National Science Foundation grant.

Matteo Millone is an Assistant Professor in finance at VU University Amsterdam. He has a multidisciplinary background in Economics, Law and Political Science. His work is focused on banking in emerging countries and the interaction between social and financial performance at the level of both institutions and investors. His work has been published on World Development and the Word Bank Economic Review.

He has extensively researched the effect of credit registries and credit bureaus on loan disbursement and performance in markets with high information asymmetries. He is currently interested in alternative forms of finance such as peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding, and the link between collateral availability and entrepreneurship.

John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is also the director of Stanford’s Introductory Economics Center.

He served as senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and as a member of the council, undersecretary of the Treasury. Taylor was awarded the university-wide Hoagland Prize and the Rhodes Prizes, as well as the Stanford Economics Department, Treasury Distinguished Service, Alexander Hamilton and Adam Smith Awards, the Bradley Prize, the Truman Medal and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay. He received a BA in economics from Princeton, a PhD in economics from Stanford. He won Hayek Prize for his book, First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity.

Enrique G. Mendoza is Presidential Professor of Economics and Director of the Penn Institute for Economic Research at the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined in 2013. Before that, he was Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, and held positions at the IMF, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Duke University. He is a 1989 PhD from the University of Western Ontario, a Research Associate of the NBER, and member of the BIS Advisory Panel and of the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. In 2017, he was awarded the ECB’s Wim Duisenberg fellowship.

His research focuses on international capital flows, financial crises, sovereign debt and international business cycles.

Laurence Ball is Professor of Economics and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been a visiting scholar or fellow at numerous central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. He is the author of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets (Worth Publishers, second edition 2012) and The Fed and Lehman Brothers (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

His research interests include unemployment, inflation, fiscal and monetary policy, and financial regulation.

Andriy Tsapin started working at the National bank of Ukraine in September 2016 and currently holds the position of Deputy Head of the Research Unit. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the European University Viadrina, Germany in 2009. In 2003, he obtained a Master’s degree in Finance at the National University of Ostroh Academy.

Andriy’s research interests include empirical corporate finance, banking, and emerging market issues, with a particular focus on big data analytics.

His recent works are dedicated to firm-bank relationships and have been published in specialized academic journals, namely the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Economic Systems, Emerging Markets Finance and Trade and so on.

Frank Smets is the Head of the Economics Area at the European Central Bank since February 2017. He was Adviser to President Draghi and Coordinator of the Counsel to the Executive Board (2013-2017). Before that, he was Director General of the Directorate General Research of the ECB. He is professor of international economics at the Centre for Economic Studies at the KU Leuven and an honorary professor in the Duisenberg chair at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen.

His research covers monetary, macroeconomic, financial and international issues mostly related to central banking. He was managing editor of the International Journal of Central Banking (2008-2010) and a research economist at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.

David Archer is the Head of the Central Banking Studies unit at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). He is also the Secretary to the Central Bank Governance Group. He has been with the BIS for 12 years. Prior to joining the BIS, Mr Archer was Assistant Governor at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. For the last 5 years of his time with the Reserve Bank he was responsible for monetary policy analysis and advice, forecasting, and research.

For the 5 years before that he was responsible for the Bank’s financial market activities. During his time at the Reserve Bank, the focus, governance, organization and management of the institution was comprehensively reshaped. For a number of years in the late 1980s Mr Archer was seconded to the IMF, where he was a desk economist in the European Department.

Andrzej Raczko is an advisor to the President of Narodowy Bank Polski. He graduated from the University of Lodz (M.A. in economics). In 1985, he obtained his Ph.D. at the same university, where he was an assistant professor until 1992. Before he started his political career, he worked in the Polish banking sector as a CEO for over 10 years. In 2003-2004, at the last stage of the Polish accession to the European Union, he was the minister of finance. Afterwards, he held the positon of an alternate executive director in the International Monetary Fund for four years. From 2010 until 2016 he was a member of the Management Board of Narodowy Bank Polski.