Ludger Woessmann is the Director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education and Professor of Economics at the University of Munich. He is also Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Being interested in the determinants of long-term prosperity of mankind, his main research focus is on the economics of education, especially the importance of education for economic prosperity and the effects of school systems on educational achievement and equality of opportunity. He is Fellow of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academic Advisory Council of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, and the International Academy of Education. https://sites.google.com/view/woessmann-e

Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is internationally recognized for his economic analysis of educational issues, and his research has had broad influence on education policy in both developed and developing countries. He received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021. He is the author of numerous widely-cited studies on the effects of class size reduction, school accountability, teacher effectiveness, and other topics. He was the first to research teacher effectiveness by measuring students' learning gains, which forms the conceptual basis for using value-added measures to evaluate teachers and schools, now a widely adopted practice. His recent book with Ludger Woessmann, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth summarizes research establishing the close links between countries' long-term rates of economic growth and the skill levels of their populations. He has authored or edited twenty-five books along with over 300 articles. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and completed his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hanushek@stanford.edu; http://hanushek.stanford.edu/