William Dickens

Dickens' research interests include unemployment, race and intelligence, and changes in IQ over time (the Flynn effect). For example, he co-authored a 2006 study with James Flynn showing that the black-white IQ gap in the United States had decreased in size by at least 25% between 1972 and 2002. He and Flynn had previously proposed a hypothesis for why IQ appears to be both highly heritable and significantly affected by the environment. Their hypothesis argued that individual's IQs are significantly affected by both genes and environment, but that people's environments change in response to their IQs.

Dickens was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley from 1980 until 1995, when he left to become a senior economist on the President of the United States' Council of Economic Advisers, where he worked for Laura Tyson. He was a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1986 to 1998. He was a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution from 1995 to 2015, where he was a visiting fellow from 1994 to 1995. In 2007, he became Thomas C. Schelling Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland, a position he held until joining Northeastern in June 2008. He subsequently served as a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar for one year.

William T. Dickens (born December 31, 1953) is an American economist. He is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Northeastern University, where he is also chair of the Department of Economics. He is also a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.