Douglass C. North is co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He is Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as Director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990 and is Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research for 20 years, Professor North received the John R. Commons Award in 1992. The author of 10 books, including Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005), his research interests include property rights, economic organization in history, and the formation of political and economic institutions and their consequences through time. He is a frequent consultant for the World Bank and numerous countries on issues of economic growth. John Joseph Wallis is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1981 and went on to spend a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. During the 2006-07 academic year, he was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution and a visiting professor of political science at Stanford. In spring of 2008 he was a visiting professor of economics at Harvard. Professor Wallis is an economic historian who specializes in the public finance of American governments and more generally on the relation between the institutional development of governments and the development of economies. His large-scale research on American state and local government finance, and on American state constitutions, has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Professor Weingast spent ten years at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Economics and the School of Business. The recipient of the Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize, and the James Barr Memorial Prize, among others, he has also worked extensively with development agencies such as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Professor Weingast coauthored Analytical Narratives (1998) and coedited The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (2006). His research focuses on the political foundations of markets, economic reform, and regulation, including problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, and legal institutions.