David Mickey-Pabello, Ph.D.
“Mickey” is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnoracial Relations at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. He holds four degrees from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor: a PhD in Sociology, MA in Sociology, MA in Higher Education, and a BA in Applied Linguistics.
At the Civil Rights Project, where Mickey is currently in virtual residence until July of 2020, he is working on organizing and contributing to two series of papers on the United States and California that investigate the future of educational civil rights issues over the next thirty years, as the American population experiences a significant ethnoracial demographic shift from majority White to minority White.
At Harvard he is currently the Senior Associate Editor of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and will continue to serve in that capacity through the duration of his Postdoctoral position at UCLA.
His research broadly covers sociology of education, race/ethnicity, social inequality, demography, assortative mating, sociology of law, social policy and specializes in affirmative action bans. He also applies a broad range of methodological approaches in his work: difference in differences, triple differencing, first differences, hierarchical modeling, matching techniques, regression decomposition, event history modeling, and qualitative techniques such as qualitative comparative analysis, and content analysis. He works with several sources of data including the NLYS, NELS, CPS, ACS, AAMC, US World & News Reports rankings, IPEDS, CDC WONDER, and the GSS. Furthermore, he has collected many sources of restricted data from the University of Michigan on its students from the Registrar’s Office, University Housing, the Office of Student Life, Greek Life, Admissions, Financial Aid, and has merged these to restricted data from the College Board on high school characteristics.
Mickey’s dissertation, “The Unintended Consequences of Affirmative Action Bans,” draws upon a wide variety of data sources mentioned above. His previous work has been published in the American Journal of Education and the Journal of Higher Education, and has been featured by The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Public Radio. So far, his dissertation has received funding from the American Educational Research Association, and he has been awarded second place for the AAHHE/ETS Outstanding Dissertations Competition. He is currently revising his award-winning dissertation work so that it is congruent with very recent econometric advancements that show staggered difference in differences estimates are biased. By extension, much of what we know about the causal impact of affirmative action bans are also subject to bias.
