Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions in the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, at the University of Oxford. He was Principal Investigator for the ERC-funded WEALTHPOL project (The Politics of Wealth Inequality and Mobility in the 21st Century) until 2022; his latest book, Why Politics Fails, was published by Penguin in 2023, when he also delivered the BBC’s Reith Lectures entitled ‘Our Democratic Future’.

Martin Daunton is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, and Visiting Professor of Economic History at Gresham College. He is an author, historian, and lecturer whose interests include the economic history of Britain since 1700, the shifting boundaries between the market and state, the politics of public finance, the relations between national and international economic policies, and debates over intergenerational equity. His latest book The Economic Government of the World, 1933 to 2023 was published by Allen Lane in 2023.

Emily Grundy is Professor of Population Science in the Institute for Social & Economic Research (ISER), at the University of Essex, where she was Institute Director 2017–20. She is also an affiliated researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health Centre for Excellence on Fertility and Health. Professor Grundy is a demographer whose research and publications have focused on health, disability, and mortality at older ages; family and household change; family life courses and later life health and wellbeing; intergenerational exchanges; and the demography of ageing.

John Muellbauer is a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, as well as Professor of Economics and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, at Oxford University. He is best known for his work on household economics, housing markets, and finance—real economy interactions through balance sheets and credit channels. One the first economists to focus on the many complex interactions between housing markets and the economy, his publications on this topic span more than forty years.

Michael Murphy is Emeritus Professor of Demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science, having joined the School in 1980. His main areas of research include: family, kinship and household demography; ageing; mechanisms for the inheritance of behaviour; mathematical and statistical demography; methods of making and evaluating population and household forecasts; the demography of developed and transitional societies. He has been an adviser to UK and US Governments, and international organisations, such as EU, UN, and OECD.

Avner Offer is Emeritus Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where he was Chichele Professor of Economic History (2000–11). He has published books on house and landed property, war economy, and self-control in consumption. His work in recent years has focused on the journey from social democracy to market liberalism. One strand of this investigates the links of finance, real estate, and household debts and assets. His best-known works include The Nobel Factor (with Gabriel Söderberg, Princeton University Press, 2016).

Susan J. Smith is Emerita Honorary Professor of Social and Economic Geography, and Life Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. She works in the interdisciplinary field of housing studies exploring the links between housing, economic inequality, health, and wellbeing. She has completed variety of funded projects over more than two decades with collaborators in the UK, USA, and Australia, and writes about the uneven integration of housing, mortgage, and financial markets, and their impacts on housing outcomes.