N. Gregory Mankiw is Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. As a student, he studied economics at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a teacher, he has taught macroeconomics, microeconomics, statistics and principles of economics. Professor Mankiw is a prolific writer and a regular participant in academic and policy debates. His work has been published in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy and Quarterly Journal of Economics. In addition to his teaching, research and writing, Professor Mankiw has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and the Congressional Budget Office. From 2003 to 2005 he served as chairman of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisors. Mark P. Taylor is the Donald Danforth, Jr Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis, USA. He was previously Dean of the Olin Business School and, before that, Dean and Professor of Finance and Economics at of Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, UK. He obtained his first degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University and a Master’s and Doctoral degrees in economics and finance from London University.. Professor Taylor has taught economics at various universities (including Warwick, Oxford, Marseille and New York), at various levels (from principles courses to advanced graduate and MBA courses) and in various fields (including macroeconomics, microeconomics and econometrics). He has also worked as a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund and at the Bank of England and as a managing director at BlackRock, the world’s largest financial asset manager, where he ran a global investment fund based on macroeconomic analysis. His work has been extensively published in scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy and the Economic Journal, and he is today one of the most highly cited economists in the world in economic research. In addition, Professor Taylor has acted as an advisor to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of England, the European Commission and to senior members of the UK government. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a member of council of the Royal Economic Society and a fellow of both the Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. Celeste Campher is a Lecturer at the Department of Economics at the University of the Free State. She currently lectures both Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at an undergraduate level and Research Methodology at post-graduate level. She has nearly 15 years lecturing experience, and also worked as a public servant in the Office of the Premier, and the Provincial Treasury in the Free State province. She is currently studying for her PhD, which is focused on the use of incentivised social discounting tasks to determine the association between social distance and time, risk and other preferences. RONNEY NCWADI is the first black academic to be appointed Head of Economics at Nelson Mandela University. Prior to that, he was a director in the Macroeconomic Analysis Unit of the Eastern Cape Provincial Treasury and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Management and Commerce at Fort Hare University.