Vladimir Antikarov is Principal at Verea Group LLC. With over 30 years of experience in corporate finance, he has served as a senior member of the corporate finance practice at the Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and as Senior Advisor to the CFO of Overseas Shipholding Group, the largest US oil tanker company. His client engagements have included work with AT&T, Merck, Lockheed Martin, Avaya, Thomson Reuters, Philips, Roche, Vale, Votorantim, Telefonica, Axel Johnson, and the World Bank in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Yemen.

Mr. Antikarov is co-author of Real Options: A Practitioner's Guide, which has been published in six languages. He is cited as a thought partner in McKinsey & Company's book Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies. His work has garnered more than 3,300 citations in professional and academic literature.

Forhad Shilpi is a Senior Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the Development Research Group. Her current research focuses on the impacts of infrastructure and communication on rural-urban transformation, the role of domestic market institutions in the transmission of international price signals, and intergenerational mobility in developing countries. Her research has been published in leading development and economics journals such as Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Canadian Journal of Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and Economic Development and Cultural Change. She holds a Ph.D. degree in economics from Johns Hopkins University, where she taught several economics courses. Prior to joining the World Bank, she worked as a research associate at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.

Ivailo V. Izvorski is the Chief Economist of the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. Over nearly 30 years, he has worked in technical and managerial positions on the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank, the Institute of International Finance, and the International Monetary Fund. Before his current position, Ivailo was the Manager of the World Bank Global Debt, Macro, and Growth Unit and, before that, the manager of the macroeconomists for Europe and Central Asia. Ivailo holds MA and PhD degrees in economics from Yale University. Ivailo is coauthor of numerous publications, including of Diversified Development: Making the Most of Natural Resources in Eurasia, Reinvigorating Growth in Resource-Rich Sub-Saharan Africa, and of Greater Heights: Growing to High Income in Europe and Central Asia.