Emily Williams is a Senior Director with Alvarez & Marsal Private Equity Performance Improvement in Boston. As Chief Economist, she works in A&M’s Commercial Due Diligence practice. She specializes in applying rigorous economic analysis and big data methodologies to uncover differentiated insights for private equity investors and corporate clients. Her primary areas of concentration are commercial due diligence, consumer behavior analysis, household financial decision-making, and data-driven value creation.
With more than 15 years of combined academic and advisory experience, Ms. Williams has built a career at the intersection of business, policy, and academic research, translating massive transactions-level datasets into actionable insights on household financial behavior. She has shaped and managed research portfolios, advised policy institutions, and built a reputation as an analyst, educator, and presenter at leading academic, policy, and industry venues globally.
Ms. Williams’s notable research has examined fintech adoption, housing markets, overdrafts and payday lending, buy now, pay later credit, peer-to-peer transfers among financially fragile households, and the impact of climate risk on household finance. Her published work has appeared in The Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics.
Prior to joining A&M, Ms. Williams spent eight years on the Finance faculty at Harvard Business School (HBS) in Cambridge, where she led teams of data scientists leveraging massive transactions-level data to advance the field of household financial decision-making. She taught the HBS case method to MBA classrooms and developed original cases on foundational finance topics.
Ms. Williams earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Warwick, an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a PhD in finance from London Business School. She currently holds a formal appointment as Lecturer at Harvard University, where she co-creates content and lectures for the university’s flagship undergraduate personal finance course, alongside Professor John Campbell. She serves as a referee for academic finance and economics journals, and she serves on academic program committees.
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