Black Women's Celebration: Dr. Miesha Williams

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Miesha J. Williams, Ph.D., is Academic Program Director  for the 17th ranked Economics program in the nation at Morehouse College ( https://study.com/resources/50-best-economics-schools ) She has been an assistant professor since August 2014 and is a budding young scholar at Morehouse College, where she earned teacher of the year award sponsored by Vulcan Materials company in 2018. Her research interests include institutions affecting black people in the United States, Africa and elsewhere. This is specifically true as it pertains to the macroeconomy and movements in economic aggregates. As academician, she has authored and coauthored various research efforts while professing at Morehouse College. She has also rendered expansive service to the economic profession.

To begin, she was awarded a research grant by the National Science Foundation through American Economic Association Mentoring Program to conduct research on South African investment patterns in subsistence farming and manufacturing sectors in the past. In spring of 2017, she served as co-researcher with Gregory Price at Morehouse College in a Koch Foundation sponsored grant, which aimed to engage students in research implicating incarcerates as potential entrepreneurs, hence, reducing recidivism with findings that were especially pervasive for black men and women in the United States.

Recently, Dr. Williams’ research efforts continue to be proactive and dynamic. One of her most recent publication examines a monetary policy approach to the differential impacts of monetary policy on blacks and whites since the Great Recession. This study is coauthored with Ejindu Ume at Miami of Ohio. The authors estimate and quantify the differences between races resulting from expansionary monetary policy. Over longer time horizons, they find that black employment is more sensitive to changes in monetary policy than that of whites. At the shorter time horizons, black employment falls; whereas, white employment immediately increases. Owing to such disparities, one should expect the central bank to be deeply engaged in understanding causal mechanisms because their findings raise concern that recent monetary policy tightening may adversely affect blacks disproportionately to whites. Other current projects of interest to Dr. Williams include (1) ineffective interest rate policy in Ghana and similar West African Countries, (2) the role of United States Foreign Direct Investment flows in the Economic Community of West African States (a.k.a.ECOWAS)(3) Microfinancing women entrepreneurs in African countries, (4)  the  impact of Procurement financing on West African countries and (5) the impacts of Pandemics on the U. S. macroeconomy.

Dr. Williams has presented at a number of conferences both across the United States and in West Africa and has been a servant in the Economic profession. She has traveled for research to places like The Gambia, Nigeria and Togo.  She has also traveled as a international instructional mentor to Berlin, Hong Kong, Liberia, London and Thailand. She is a member of the American Economic Association, National Economic Association, Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics and the The Ph.D. Project’s Finance and Economics Doctoral Student Association. Within the National Economic Association (formerly the Caucus of Black Economist) she served as committee member where she helped to organize and commemorate the Association’s 50th year of existence and host a panel informing the profession on the status of Black Women with terminal degrees in Economics. She has also served as a reviewer for the Review of Black Political Economy journal, is secretary of the African Political Economy Association and is a Research Associate in the University of New Orleans Entrepreneurship and Policy Institute. 

​Finally, Dr. Miesha Williams earned a B.S. in economics from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2007 (Strike Rattlers Strike!)  and a doctorate in economics from the University of Alabama in 2014 (Roll Tide!)

Email: Miesha.Williams@morehouse.edu