Amy Claessens is a Research Associate and Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, studying education, child development, and public policy. Claessens' work investigates how policies and programs influence child development and how early achievement and socioemotional skills relate to subsequent life outcomes. Claessens's work uses administrative or large-scale longitudinal data and utilizes both quantitative and qualitative techniques.

Dan A. Black is a professor at the Harris School and a Senior Fellow at the National Opinion Research Center. He currently serves as the principal investigator for the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, is co-project director (with Bob Michael) of the NLSY program at NORC, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Labor Economics, Labour Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics.