Milan Vaishnav is a Senior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behaviour. He is the author of When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Yale University Press/HarperCollins India 2017) and co-editor (with Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta) of Rethinking Public Institutions in India (Oxford University Press 2017). Previously, he worked at the Center for Global Development, where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow; the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities. He holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Devesh Kapur is the Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India and Director, Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; and Non-Resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C. He is the coauthor of The World Bank: Its First Half Century; Public Institutions in India: Performance; and Design and Against the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs. His three books on international migration examine the effects at a global level (Give us your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World); and on the country of emigration (Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India published by Princeton University Press which received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association).