Antonio Peyrache is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia; and the deputy director of the Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis (CEPA). Antonio obtained an undergraduate and master’s degree in Statistics and Economics from “La Sapienza” University of Rome. He obtained his PhD from the same university in 2008. He has co-authored and published about 18 papers in the field of Efficiency and Productivity analysis. Antonio has been involved in consultancy and research collaborations with several organizations, including, for example, the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) and the Vietnamese Ministry for Science and Technology. In recent years, Antonio has focused his research on activity analysis production models and their application to applied problems of optimal allocation of resources in production organizations. This spurred an interest in the trade-off that several public service providers seem to show between processing times of new cases (patients for hospitals, criminal and civil cases for courts, etc.) and the resources of those production units. Backloads, capacity constraints and rationing by waiting are the key elements of the modelling and applications that have attracted his attention in recent years.

Kristof De Witte is a full professor in Education Economics and Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, Belgium, and he holds the chair in ‘Effectiveness and Efficiency of Educational Innovations’ at United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Kristof De Witte has more than 100 indexed publications, most in the area of education economics, performance evaluation, and political economy and many in the leading journals from various academic fields, including ‘American Sociological Review’, ‘The Economic Journal’, ‘Journal of Urban Economics’, ‘European Journal of Operational Research’, ‘Government Information Quarterly’, ‘Economics of Education Review’, ‘Labour Economics’, ‘Exceptional Children’, ‘World Development’, and ‘Educational Research Review’. Kristof De Witte serves as an expert in the ‘European Commission Expert Group on quality investment in education and training’ and is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the ‘2021 Pioneer Award’ of KU Leuven, the ‘2020 Laureate of the Academy’ award from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, the ‘2021 CELSA Service to Society Award’ (honorific), two international prizes for his doctoral dissertation, among others.

Professor Barbara Casu is the Head of the Faculty of Finance at Bayes Business School, City, University of London (UK), and the Director of the Centre for Banking Research (CBR). Previously she held the role of Director of the Bayes Executive PhD Programme. Her main research interests are in empirical banking, payment systems, financial regulation, financial innovation, and corporate governance. Barbara has published widely, with over 50 publications in peer reviewed Journals. She has also written the popular textbook “Introduction to Banking” (Pearson FT), which is widely adopted for banking courses across the world. She has recently co-edited the Palgrave Handbook of European Banking. Outside academia, Professor Casu has been a consultant/visiting researcher at several organizations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the European Commission (EC); the South African Reserve Bank (SARB); Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS); the Building Societies Association (BSA).

Finn R. Førsund was born in Oslo (1943). He was educated at the University of Oslo, where he received his Doctor Philosophie degree in 1983 based on journal papers on production theory and efficiency analyses. He has been a full professor at Department of Economics, University of Oslo since 1980 and Professor Emeritus since January 2014. His main research interests have been the fields of production functions, environmental economics, energy economics, and productivity and efficiency since his first journal paper in 1971 on production functions. He has published extensively within these fields in journals like Swedish Journal of Economics, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Journal of Productivity Analysis, Resource and Energy Economics, among others. He has pioneered efficiency measurements for variable returns to scale production functions (together with Lennart Hjalmarsson). He developed Malmquist productivity indices for measuring changes in productivity over time. The first environmental paper was published in 1972 and the most recent environmental one in 2021. The efforts to develop tools for dynamic analyses of structural change based on micro units pioneered by Professor Leif Johansen’s book (1972) resulted in several journal papers. (He was a research assistant on Leif Johansen’s book project). He has also contributed with book chapters in books related to his themes. Related issues are also documented in a book (2000) on a putty-clay approach to industry structure (coauthored by Lennart Hjalmarsson and based on the Ph.D.’s of both). His latest book is on Hydropower Economics (2015).