Jongchul Kim received his PhD in Political Science from York University, Toronto, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Society, Germany and at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. The title of his doctoral dissertation is “Identity, Money, and Trust: The Origin, Politics, and Ontology of Early Modern Paper Money in England, the 17th – Early 19th Century.” He was awarded the outstanding paper prize by the Association of Evolutionary Economics in US in January 2014. His research has examined the interconnected relationship between philosophy, law, politics, and banking. Specifically, his research extends the legal concept of the trust beyond its narrow legal boundaries, opening the door to an interdisciplinary understanding of the concept to explain the social, political, cultural, and philosophical foundations of modern banking. So far, his research covers three areas: the origin and nature of modern banking, the political economy of modern banking, and the ontology of modern banking. His contribution to a new understanding of the origin and nature of modern banking, “How modern banking originated: The London Goldsmith-bankers’ Institutionalization of the Trust,” has been published in Business History. And his contribution to a new understanding of the political economy of modern banking, “Modern Politics as a Trust Scheme, and its Relevance to Modern Banking,” has been published in the Journal of Economics Issues. Also, his contribution to a new understanding of the ontology of modern banking, “Identity and the Hybridity of Modern Finance: How a Specifically Modern Concept of the Self Underlies the Modern Ownership of Property, Trusts and Finance” has been published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics.

Sai Balakrishnan holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT and a PhD in Urban Planning from Harvard. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the restructuring of land markets during India’s contemporary agrarian to urban transition, the land conflicts precipitated by these changes and the unique case of land cooperatives in the Pune region as a hybrid institutional innovation for resolving these conflicts. Sai has worked as an urban planner in India and the U.A.E and as a consultant to the UN-HABITAT, Nairobi. Sai is also a Research Associate at the Land Governance Laboratory, a not-for-profit organization that studies and disseminates innovative land tools for more inclusive land resource allocation in rapidly urbanizing countries in the global south.