MIT Predoctoral Fellowship Awarded to Ph.D. Student in Economics

Morgan Williams Jr., a fourth-year student in the Ph.D. Program in Economics, has been awarded a Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
 
The fellowship provides $50,000 in funding and a 12-month appointment without teaching requirements. The funding will support Williams's work on his dissertation, which explores the economics of mass incarceration and crime.
 
"Despite being home to only five percent of the world population, the United States accounts for approximately one-quarter of the global inmate population," he wrote in a summary of his research. "My essays are aimed at addressing an important gap in the economics of crime literature - namely the social welfare implications of mass incarceration."
 
Williams's research focuses on issues such as how incarceration policies influence marriage markets; the implications of mass incarceration policies for societal learning and criminal behavior; and how "ban-the-box policies," designed to reduce employment discrimination towards workers with criminal records, influence employer beliefs about the productivity of ex-convict workers and their incentives for recidivist behavior.

His dissertation advisor is Distinguished Professor Michael Grossman (Economics).
 
"The Graduate Center provided me with an extraordinary opportunity to engage scholars from a variety of disciplines," said Williams, a graduate of Morehouse College and Columbia University. "My experiences as a doctoral student at the Graduate Center remain essential to the advancement of my larger research agenda on social inequality."

Read more about Williams.