Peter Temin is Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and has a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. He was Head of the Economics Department and currently is its Director of Graduate Studies. His research interests include the development of American business and industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written books on the iron and steel and pharmaceutical industries, edited books on business history more generally, and written many articles on business and economic history.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Professor of Economics and History at the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her Ph.D. in 1979 from the Johns Hopkins University. She has written The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge, 1985) and Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections and Economic Development in Industrial New England (Cambridge, 1994), as well as a number of articles on various topics in business history, financial history, and the history of technology. Her current research interests include projects on the organization of invention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States, corporate governance and business's choice of organizational form in the United States and France in the same period, and the emergence of the public/private distinction in American history.

Daniel M. G. Raff is Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously held teaching appointments at the business and law schools of Columbia University, the Harvard Business School, and Oxford University. He has published widely in journals such as American Economic Review, American Historical Review, Business History Review, Journal of Economic History, and Journal of Political Economy.