James W. Kolari is the JP Morgan Chase Professor of Finance and Academic Director of the Global Corporate Banking Program in the Department of Finance at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA. He has taught money and capital markets as well as banking classes there since earning his PhD in finance in 1980. Over the years, he has held various appointments such as Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Fulbright Scholar to the Bank of Finland, and Senior Research Fellow at the Swedish School of Business and Economics (Hanken), Finland in addition to being a consultant to the U.S. Small Business Administration, U.S. Information Agency, and numerous banks and other organizations. With more than 100 articles published in refereed journals, numerous other papers and monographs, 25 co-authored books, and more than 200 competitive papers presented at academic conferences, he ranks in the top 1-2 percent of finance scholarsin the United States. His papers have appeared in such domestic and international journals as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Business, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Banking and Finance, Critical Finance Review, Journal of Empirical Finance, Real Estate Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, and the Scandinavian Journal of Economics. Papers in Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Russian, and Spanish have appeared outside of the United States. He is a co-author of leading college textbooks in introductory business and commercial banking courses.

Seppo Pynnönen is Professor of Statistics at the University of Vaasa, Finland and previously the Chairperson of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He has studied financial markets and taught various courses on statistical methodology, empirical finance, and mathematical finance covering undergraduate, graduate, and PhD levels since earning his PhD in mathematical statistics in 1988. He has published several papers in international finance and statistics journals including Review of Finance Studies, Critical Finance Review, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of International Money and Finance, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, and Communication in Statistics - Simulation and Computation.