James Tobin
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored endogenous variables, the well-known "Tobit model". Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
William Brainard
Along with his frequent collaborator James Tobin, Brainard developed the theory of Tobin's q. The concept first appeared in Brainard and Tobin's 1968 article "Pitfalls in Financial Model Building" The letter "Q," however, was not introduced until Tobin's 1969 article "A general equilibrium approach to monetary theory." So, while references to "Q theory" generally carry only Tobin's name, Brainard and Tobin jointly introduced the concept. Brainard was co-editor with George Perry of the "Brookings Papers on Economic Activity" from 1980 through 2007, and continues to serve on its advisory panel.