Edward Ludwig "Ed" Glaeser (born May 1, 1967) is an economist at Harvard University. He was educated at The Collegiate School in New York City before obtaining his B.A. in economics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Glaeser joined the faculty of Harvard in 1992, where he is currently (as of April 2012) the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor at the Department of Economics, the Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and the Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston (both at the Kennedy School of Government). He was also an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Glaeser's connections with both Chicago and Harvard make him a linkage between the Chicago School and the Cambridge School of Economics. Glaeser and John A. List were mentioned as reasons why the AEA committee began to award the Clark Medal annually in 2009.

He is the author of the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, published by Penguin Press in 2011. According to a review in the New York Times, the book summarizes Glaeser's years of research into the role that cities play in fostering human achievement and "is at once polymathic and vibrant".

Paul Romer (born 1955) is an American economist, entrepreneur, and activist. He is currently professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Prior to that, Romer was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Development, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Hoover Institution, and a fellow at the Center for Global Development. He is a pioneer of endogenous growth theory.

Romer earned a B.S. in physics in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1983, both from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. He was named one of America's 25 most influential people by Time Magazine in 1997, and in 2000 started the online educational company Aplia, which was purchased in 2007 by Cengage Learning. Romer was awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics in 2002. He is the son of former Colorado governor Roy Romer.

Paul Romer's most important work is in the field of economic growth. Economists studied long-run growth extensively during the 1950s and 1960s. The work of Robert Solow, for example, established the primacy of technological progress in accounting for sustained increases in output per worker. Romer's articles published in 1986 and 1990 amounted to constructing mathematical representations of economies in which technological change is the result of the intentional actions of people, such as research and development.