Youssef Cassis is Professor of Economic History at the European University Institute, Florence. His work mainly focuses on banking and financial history, as well as business history more generally. His numerous publications on the subject include City Bankers, 1890-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Big Business. The European Experience in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1997), Capitals of Capital. A ... Read moreHistory of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Crises and Opportunities. The Shaping of Modern Finance (Oxford University Press, 2011). He was the cofounder, in 1994, of Financial History Review (Cambridge University Press) and is a past President (2005-2007) of the European Business History Association. Giuseppe De Luca is Associate Professor of Economic History at the University of Milan. He holds a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University Bocconi and has been visiting professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and at the University of Valladolid. He is a specialist in early modern European finance and financing, with a focus on Italy and the Spanish Empire. He is currently collaborating on cross-country comparisons of informal credit markets, on a Spanish National Research Council project on 'Banks in Madrid and Milan under the Habsburgs'. Massimo Florio is Professor of Public Economics and the Jean Monnet Chair 'ad personam' of EU Industrial Policy at the University of Milan, where he has also been the head of the Department of Economics, Business, and Statistics. He has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, where he started his research on privatisation, leading to his books The Great Divestiture (MIT Press, 2004) and more recently Network Industries and Social Welfare (OUP, 2013). For more than 20 years, Professor Florio has advised the European Commission and other international organisations on social cost-benefit analysis of infrastructure projects. Show Less