Marius R. Busemeyer is a Full Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz and Speaker of the Excellence Cluster "The Politics of Inequality". His research focuses on comparative political economy, the welfare state and inequality. Busemeyer holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Heidelberg and worked as a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. He held visiting professor- and fellowships at, for example, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, the WZB Berlin, the Graduate Center at CUNY (New York) and the Amsterdam Center for Inequality Studies (AMCIS). Achim Kemmerling is the Gerhard Haniel Chair of Public Policy and International Development and director of the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt. He holds a PhD from Freie Universitÿt in Berlin and has previously worked at Central European University Budapest, Jacobs University Bremen and the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin. He was visiting fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore, and the Colegio de MÃ(c)xico, Mexico. He does research on the political economy of social, labour and tax policies in OECD and developing countries. Paul Marx is Professor of Political Science and Socio-Economics at University of Duisburg-Essen. Previously, he held positions at University of Southern Denmark and at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics (Bonn, Germany). He received his PhD degree in Social Sciences from the University of Cologne (Germany) in 2011. His research interests are related to social and political inequality, political behaviour, and comparative welfare state and labour market analysis. Kees van Kersbergen studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (MA 1984) and received his PhD degree (with distinction) in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (1991). He held positions at the University of Amsterdam, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the University of Nijmegen. He was a visiting scholar at the European University Institute, the University of Konstanz, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lectured at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Sichuan University. Currently he is professor of comparative politics at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
