He worked as an economist for the government of Uganda for two years before choosing to continue his formal education at Yale University, and earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1991.
Morris is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 2002 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.
He held the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 2005–2006 year and was the President of the Econometric Society in 2019.
Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin considered a stylized currency crises model, in which traders observe the relevant fundamentals with small noise, and show that this leads to the selection of a unique equilibrium.
This result is in stark contrast with models of complete information, which feature multiple equilibria.