Barro has been described as one of the leading conservative economists in the United States, and perhaps no better measure of Barro's influence can be found than this: Essential Science Indicators determined that Barro was the most-cited economist of the 1990s.

But don't let Barro's academic standing fool you: he can communicate in plain English too -- Barro is one of Business Week's "Economic Viewpoint" columnists, and was a contributing editor for The Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 1998.

His official biography online lists Barro's research interests as economic growth and macroeconomics, so he can -- and in his column does -- talk about just about any big picture issue you care to name. And that picture could be even bigger than most people think: one of Barro's most recent papers looks at religion and its impact on economies. (His conclusion, with Harvard professor Rachel McCleary, may seem paradoxical: Increased belief in heaven or decreased church attendance can stimulate economic growth)

Some of Barro's other recent papers (some with collaborators) include: "Inequality and Growth in a Panel of Countries" (Income inequality hinders economic growth in poor countries, but boosts growth in rich nations); "IMF Programs: Who Is Chosen and What Are the Effects?" (Loans from the International Monetary Fund seem to hurt a country's economic growth in the long run)"Optimal Currency Areas" (The dollar and euro have well-defined areas, but the yen doesn't; and adopting another nation's currency increases trade for both countries involved).

Barro's resume includes stints at Brown University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institution (where he remains a senior fellow). He has been a professor at Harvard since 1986. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970. Barro won the Association of Private Enterprise Economists' Adam Smith Award in 1998.

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Selected FORTUNE columns, 1997-99:

Fans of Krugman will describe as him as a brilliant thinker, eloquent writer, debunker of economic myths and a future winner of the Nobel Prize. Many of his critics will blast him as an egotistical self-promoter with a "limited background in economics" whose actual academic output has dropped since he decided to become a populist writer -- the other professor on this week's program, Robert Barro, has described Krugman as his "favorite non-economist economist"

One thing is certain: Krugman does think a lot of his work, which is a common character trait among academics. What isn't so common is that Krugman is also willing -- eager, even -- to say when he thinks someone else's views aren't as smart as his. And often he isn't nice about it.

The perspective, of course, largely depends on whether you agree with him. Krugman wears his ideology on his sleeve -- he has called himself an "unabashed defender of the welfare state" -- and he has been fortunate enough to get soapboxes that let him reach millions of people: prior to becoming a columnist for The New York Times, he wrote monthly columns for FORTUNE and the online magazine Slate. He has written 18 books, most notably The Age of Diminished Expectations, The Return of Depression Economics and Peddling Prosperity. And despite his self-described liberal leanings, Krugman has been willing to cross political lines -- some of Krugman's fiercest invective has been directed at well-known lefties such as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and in the early 1980s, Krugman was an economic adviser to the very conservative administration of President Ronald Reagan.

These days, Krugman spends a good deal of time criticizing the Bush administration, although he says he'd like to to be an equal-opportunity irritant. "With any luck, you will find many of these pieces extremely annoying," Krugman writes on his Web site. "My belief is that if an op-ed or column does not greatly upset a substantial number of people, the author has wasted the space. This is particularly true in economics, where many people have strong views and rather fewer have taken the trouble to think those views through -- so that simply insisting on being clear-headed about an issue is usually enough to enrage many if not most of your readers."

Krugman first established himself as a top-tier economist in the late 1970s and 1980s, with his research on international trade -- his work was recognized by the American Economics Association in 1991, when it gave Krugman a John Bates Clark Medal. Krugman has become recognized as an expert on financial crises -- among other things, he predicted the Asian blowup of the late 1990s, although he later said that he was "90% wrong about Asia -- it's just that everyone else was 150% wrong."

His resume is a listing of one elite institution after another: Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977; assistant professor at Yale University from 1977 to 1980; assistant, associate professor and professor posts at MIT from 1979 to 1994, interrupted by 11 months as the international policy economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1982 and '83; professor at Stanford University from 1994 to 1996; back to MIT for another four years; and currently a professor at Princeton University.

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This is Chanos' first return to Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE since his appearance for the inaugural broadcast on June 28 last year. He has a good reason to come back -- his flagship Ursus Fund posted its third straight stellar year in 2002, when it rose 35 percent even as the bear market continued.

On the other hand, Chanos' short-selling picks on the June 28 broadcast and accompanying Web site have been a mixed bag, largely thanks to the overall market's sharp increase during the autumn.

Of the four individual stocks Chanos named for Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE as shorting targets, three of them -- Yahoo, Eastman Kodak and Sprint -- have risen at least slightly since June 28. In fact, Eastman Kodak, the Dow Jones Industrial Average's top gainer in 2002, although Kodak shares have been on a precipitous slide since early January. On the other hand, Yahoo and Sunrise Assisted Living did slide for more than three months after late June, so there were profitable shorting opportunity there for those who covered prudently -- but if you rode a Yahoo short past the fall, your wallet would have been decimated, as the stock has risen sharply since early October.

Chanos also said he was shorting the entire cable industry. Again, the stocks have been mixed -- among the biggest cable companies, Charter Communications has been very good to short-sellers since late June, Cox Communications and Cablevision have risen, and Comcast would have been a good short for people who covered by early October, and a bad one for those who pushed it too long beyond that.

Regardless of how he has done over the past seven months, it's undeniable that Chanos over the past 20 years has become one of Wall Street's short-selling legends by correctly anticipating several business debacles in the 1980s, starting with Baldwin-United in 1982. The bull market crushed Kynikos in the late 1990s, but time proved Chanos correct as the bubbles popped for Internet, technology and communications stocks. Kynikos' Ursus Partners hedge fund rolled up gains of 47.4 percent in 2000 and 18.2 percent in 2001 while major indices wallowed in losses.

Chanos says he's currently shorting the health care industry, among other areas.

Last year Chanos has regained his position as a media star, thanks to his prescience on Enron. He started shorting Enron in late 2000, almost a year before everyone else--"the market call of the decade, if not the past 50 years" Barron's gushed a year ago. Chanos also tabbed two massive losers last year. Credit card issuer Metris fell 48.8 percent in the months following the Barron's article. And then there's a pick that will surely burnish Chanos' reputation: Tyco, a stock he began shorting when it was in the high 50s in late 2001, and down 68 percent in the first six months of 2002.

Kynikos Associates through the domestic Ursus Partners fund as well as Ursus International for international clients, shorts stocks that it perceives as overvalued. Chanos also manages the fully hedged Beta Hedge and Beta Hedge International funds, and he recently started a new fund that allows for the more traditional approach of buying stocks and fixed bonds, rather than only shorting equities.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chanos graduated from Yale University in 1980 and presently lives in New York with his wife and four children. Between graduation and starting his own firm, Chanos gained financial experience as an analyst with Paine Webber, Gilford Securities and Deutsche Bank where his specialty was finding and evaluating overpriced securities.

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