Contributor(s): Professor Anton Hemerijck, Dr Waltraud Schelkle, Professor David Soskice | Professor Hemerijck will consider whether the aftermath of the 2008 global credit crunch marks a new opportunity to reconfigure and re-legitimise social policy and the European project. Anton Hemerijck is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and vice rector at the VU University Amsterdam. He is LSE Centennial Professor in the Department of Social Policy. Trained as an economist and political scientist, he obtained his doctorate from Oxford University in 1993.Between 2001-2009, he directed the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the principle think tank in the Netherlands, while holding professorships in comparative European social policy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Antwerp. He has written extensively on the welfare state, comparative political economy, political transformation and institutional change, and is the author of Changing Welfare States. Waltraud Schelkle is an associate professor of political economy at the European Institute, LSE, which she joined in 2001. She is also an adjunct professor of economics at the economics department of the Free University of Berlin. She is interested in the political economy of European monetary integration as well as the role of financial markets in welfare states. David Soskice has been School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the LSE since 2012. He was previously research professor of comparative political economy at Oxford University and research professor of political science at Duke; before that he was research director at the WZB from 1990 to 2001, and before that taught macroeconomics at Oxford. He works on varieties of capitalism, and the political economy of macroeconomics. David Piachaud is professor of social policy in the Department of Social Policy at the LSE.