Mehdi Mili, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Bahrain, Kingdom of Bahrain. Previously he was Head of the Research Department at the Central Bank of Tunisia. He received his Master in Finance from the University of Sfax, Tunisia, in 2002, and his PhD in Finance from the University of Sfax, Tunisia and the University of Poitiers, France, in 2008. His research interests include fixed income modeling, interest rate risk management, and structured products. Mehdi is a regular conference speaker and his research has been published in several international journals (e.g. Emerging Markets Review, Economic Modeling, Journal of Asset Management) and funded by the University of Sfax and the University of Bahrain. Filippo Di Pietro, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Department of Financial Economics and Operations Management, Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) and a contract agent at the Joint Research Center (European Commission). He teaches on financial derivatives markets and financial systems and markets at the undergraduate and graduate level. He received his Master's degree in Finance from the University of Bologna (Italy), and his doctorate in Business Administration, with a specialization in Finance, from the Universidad de Sevilla. He has been a Visiting Professor at various European universities, and his current research interests include corporate finance, SMEs, risk management, innovation, and regional financial systems. His recent contributions have been published in Long Range Planning, the Journal of Financial Service Research, Journal of Small Business Economics, Regional Studies, Applied Economics Letters, Sustainability, and the Journal of Economics and Business. Reyes Samaniego Medina, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the Pablo de Olavide University of Seville (Spain). She is currently a member of the Banking and Entrepreneurial Finance Research Group (https://www.upo.es/investiga/banef/) andhas been a visiting lecturer at e.g. the Centre of Quantitative Finance in London and the Leonard N. Stern School of Business in New York. She has published research articles in various journals, including the Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Business Economics and Management, and Journal of Economics and Business. Her main research interests are in the management and control of credit risk, the Basel Accords and capital structure.
