David Mickey-Pabello

DMP

David Mickey-Pabello

dmickeyp@fas.harvard.edu | scholar.harvard.edu/dmickeypabello/home

My work keeps returning to the same question from different directions: why does racial and economic inequality persist — and why does the data we use to track it so often get it wrong?

Two papers I'm currently completing challenge what most social scientists think they know about racial bias in America. Using multilevel regression and poststratification to calibrate nearly 4 million Project Implicit respondents to the actual demographic composition of the U.S. population, I show that the apparent near-elimination of explicit racial bias is substantially a measurement artifact — prior estimates were working from the wrong baseline. Under correct estimation, explicit and implicit bias have decoupled dramatically: explicit bias has declined 88 percent while implicit bias has fallen only 12 percent. During the Trump administration, the two measures diverged in opposite directions simultaneously — implicit bias spiking, explicit bias continuing to fall — consistent with a racialized political environment that activates automatic associations without shifting socially regulated explicit preferences.

This work extends a decade of research on affirmative action bans — what actually happens to enrollment, degree attainment, medical school diversity, and STEM representation when universities are prohibited from considering race. The promised meritocracy never materialized. Students of color didn't disappear; they cascaded into less selective institutions. STEM and medical pipelines narrowed. The bans produced new forms of stratification, not fairer ones. My other work examines gentrification and school segregation, labor conditions in California's Inland Empire, and what population-level attitude change can tell us about the structural forces sustaining discrimination even as expressed prejudice declines.

Positions

I am a Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for Race, Inequality, and Social Equity Studies and Director of Research at the Workforce Intelligence Lab. I spent the five preceding years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnoracial Relations at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research — work that grew directly from my dissertation on the structural consequences of affirmative action bans. From 2021 to 2023, I served as Director of the California Initiative on Civil Rights at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, where I also taught in the Graduate School of Education and Information Science. I have held additional research director and faculty positions at UC Riverside and Pepperdine University.

Education

Four degrees from the University of Michigan:

  • PhD, Sociology — 2019
  • MA, Sociology — 2017
  • MA, Higher Education — 2010
  • BA, Applied Linguistics — 2008

Research Areas and Methods

My research covers racial inequality, affirmative action policy, racial attitudes and implicit bias, the sociology of education, labor markets, neighborhood change, assortative mating, demography, and the sociology of law. I draw on sociology, social psychology, economics, and law as the problem demands.

Methodologically, I use difference-in-differences, triple-differencing, hierarchical modeling, matching techniques, regression decomposition, event history modeling, multilevel regression and poststratification, qualitative comparative analysis, legislative analysis, and qualitative interviews. I work with the NLSY, NELS, CPS, ACS, AAMC, IPEDS, CDC WONDER, and GSS, among other sources. I have also collected and merged restricted administrative data from the University of Michigan's Registrar, Housing, Admissions, Financial Aid, and Student Life offices with restricted College Board data on high school characteristics.

I serve as Senior Associate Editor at the Du Bois Review.

Selected Publications

Peer-Reviewed

  • Mickey-Pabello, D., and Guerra, S. (2025). "Affirmative Action Bans, Individual Bias, and Systemic Inequality." Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • Mickey-Pabello, D. (2024). "The Anti-Affirmative Action Avalanche: Where Students Enroll After Affirmative Action Bans." Sociology of Education — Featured Article, January 2024
  • Mickey-Pabello, D. (2023). "Underrepresented Student STEM and non-STEM Degree Attainment in the Wake of Affirmative Action Bans." Research in Higher Education
  • Mickey-Pabello, D., and Garces, L.M. (2018). "Addressing Racial Health Inequities: Understanding the Impact of Affirmative Action Bans on Applications and Admissions in Medical Schools." American Journal of Education
  • Garces, L.M., and Mickey-Pabello, D. (2015). "Racial Diversity in the Medical Profession: The Impact of Affirmative Action Bans on Student of Color Enrollment in Medical Schools." The Journal of Higher Education
  • Mordechay, K., Mickey-Pabello, D., and Ascue, J. (Forthcoming). "Divergent Paths of Urban Change: How Racialized Gentrification and Metropolitan Geography Shape School Segregation." Urban Education
  • Bobo, L.D., and Mickey-Pabello, D. (2020). [Introduction] "Ethnoracial Exclusion and Social Inequality." Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race

Policy Research

Policy reporting through the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Inland Empire Labor and Community Center at UC Riverside covers labor conditions, home care workers, EV logistics workforce transitions, and climate hazards facing workers in Southern California.

My research has been cited in amicus briefs in two U.S. Supreme Court cases: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Fisher v. University of Texas

Grants and Funding

  • James Irvine Foundation — $900,000 (2025), PI
  • UC Worker's Rights Policy Initiative — $1,500,000 (2025)
  • Community Workforce Agreement Project — $38,728 (2025)
  • Spencer Foundation — $50,000 (2022)
  • American Educational Research Association Research Grant — $25,000 (2021), PI
  • AERA Minority Dissertation Fellowship — $19,000 (2018), PI
  • Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
  • William and Flora Hewlett Foundation