Louis P. Cain is Professor of Economics at Loyola University Chicago, Adjunct Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, Senior Investigator at the Center for Population Economics, University of Chicago, and Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern.  With the late Jonathan Hughes, he is the author of American Economic History, now in its 8^th edition (2011). His research includes projects on urban mortality, urban sanitation, industrial development, and the economic history of Chicago.  He has served as a trustee of the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference, and as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cliometric Society.

Donald G. Paterson is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia. He received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge. He is the author (with William L Marr) of Canada: An Economic History (1980) and has published widely in the areas of history of international investment, economic history of natural resource use, history of US technical change, macro-economic history of Canada, and business history.

Cain and Paterson previously co-authored two articles on biased technological change in The Journal of Economic History.