Lisa Blaydes is an assistant professor in the political science department at Stanford who specializes in comparative politics and politics of the Middle East. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her articles have appeared in theAmerican Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. She holds degrees in international relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University and in political science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association. She has also been an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

Russell Boyer has been in the economics department of the University of Western Ontario for more than four decades, maintaining his interest throughout in the structure of the open economy macromodel. During this period he has had leaves to attend the London School of Economics, Carnegie Mellon University, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales.

Boyer has published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Monetary Economics, as well as in numerous conference volumes. Boyer was a visiting fellow at the Milton Friedman Institute during the 2010–11 academic year. During his time as a national fellow at Hoover, Boyer intends to continue the research that he has conducted during the past ten years into the interactions among Friedman, Johnson, and Mundell, specifically on the macrotopics that were current during the time they were together at the University of Chicago.

Songying Fang is an assistant professor of political science at Rice University. Her research focuses on how international institutions influence state behavior. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, and Quarterly Journal of Political Science. While at Hoover, she will study how the relationships between different types of regimes may affect international conflict. Professor Fang received her PhD from the University of Rochester and was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota before joining the faculty at Rice University. She was also a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and co-organized the “International Political Economy and China” conference in 2008 in Beijing sponsored by the Niehaus Center.

James Gimpel is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Maryland, College Park. His areas of interest include political geography, voting and opinion, political campaigns, and the politics of immigration policy. He has written recent articles on the mobilization of volunteers and donors in political campaigns, as well as on the redistribution of the electorate through population mobility. His ongoing research involves the study of campaign contributions and new uses of geographic analysis tools (software) to study politics and policy.

He consults regularly with political campaigns, interest groups, and 527 organizations on political mobilization and the evaluation of campaign tactics.

He served as editor of American Politics Research, a peer-reviewed political science journal, for eight years and worked on Capitol Hill in the US Senate for two years. Gimpel holds a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

Sandra Kuntz Ficker is a professor of economic history at El Colegio de México. She has been a visiting research fellow at the University of Chicago (1989 - 90) and the University of California, San Diego (1997 - 98) and the Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University (1999) and at the University of Texas at Austin (2008). She is general secretary of the Mexican Economic History Association. Her research deals with the economic history of Mexico from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, particularly the economic impact of railroads, Mexico’s foreign trade and commercial policy, and Mexico’s economic development during the first globalization (1870 - 1930). Her recent publications include El comercio exterior de México en la era del capitalismo liberal, 1870 - 1929 (El Colegio de México, 2007); Las exportaciones mexicanas durante la primera globalización, 1870 - 1929 (El Colegio de México, 2010); and (as editor) Historia económica general de México.De la colonia a nuestros días (El Colegio de México, 2010). Her articles in English include “From Structuralism to New Institutional Economics: The Impact of Theory on the Study of Foreign Trade in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 40, no. 3 (2005).

Andrew Reeves is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University. He studies the relationship between electoral institutions and policy outcomes with a focus on the presidency. His recent research makes two central claims: first, that presidents are increasingly held accountable for local political phenomena in addition to broad macroeconomic outcomes; second, that presidents respond by targeting specific constituencies with resources such as federal grants, presidential disaster declarations, and campaign expenditures. He is currently completing a book manuscript related to this project.

Daron Shaw received his BA and PhD degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1994. His most recent book is Unconventional Wisdom (Oxford University Press), which empirically reconsiders such electoral phenomena as popular perceptions of turnout, swing voting, the gender gap, and youth voting. His previous book, The Race to 270 (Chicago University Press), analyzes the effects of TV advertising and candidate visits on the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Professor Shaw has also published articles on public opinion and voting, election campaigns, and other topics in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Communication, British Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Public Opinion Quarterly, PS: Political Science, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, and American Politics Research.