Shaping markets: Law, institutions and governments in the time of COVID-19

Katharina Pistor is a distinguished scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. Pistor publishes widely in legal and social science journals and has recently argued that the rise of a global money system means a new definition of sovereignty: the control of money. Her last book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019), was named as one of the books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider for its examination of the links between the formation of capital and the operation of the legal system. She is the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation, a research associate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.  She was co-recipient of the Max Planck Research Award on International Financial Regulation in 2012 and received the European Corporation Governance Institute’s Allen & Overy Prize for the best working paper on law in 2014.

Mariana Mazzucato is amongst the most significant contemporary thinkers on innovation and the evolution of markets. Her work has challenged the account of innovation and growth in orthodox economics and initiated new research streams and policy directions. Her highly-acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (2013) had a huge impact on the understanding of the role of public organisations in the history of technological change. Her 2018 book, The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, developed these arguments to bring value theory back to the centre of economics so that we can reward value creation rather than value extraction. She advises policy makers around the world, including the Scottish Government, the UN, the European Commission, the Finnish Innovation Fund (Sitra), the Research Council of Norway and the President of South Africa. She received the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy, the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis, the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. 

Rainer Kattel is a leading thinker on the organisational and institutional aspects of innovation and innovation policies. His work has revealed the delicate balancing act for entrepreneurial states whereby they create space for agility and experimentation, while simultaneously providing stability to minimise long-term uncertainty. Recently, he has focused on the digital transformation of the public sector, aiming to understand how this is reshaping public services and their delivery and the resulting socio-political and market dynamics. He has written and edited numerous books on innovation and public policy, including the forthcoming Innovation Bureaucracies: Let's Make the State Entrepreneurial (with Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo). For ten years he led the Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance and has served as an expert for numerous public bodies such as the Estonian Research Council, the European Science Foundation, the OECD, UNDP and the European Commission. Currently, he leads the Estonian Government’s Gender Equality Council and is a member of the E-Estonia Council advising the Prime Minister of Estonia. In 2013, he received Estonia's National Science Award for his work on innovation policy.