While on leave he served as a senior economist with the President of the United States' Council of Economic Advisers, in 1993-94 where he worked for Laura Tyson.
[2] In 2007, he became Thomas C. Schelling Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland, a position he held until joining Northeastern in June 2008.
Dickens' research interests include unemployment,[6][7] race and intelligence,[8][9] and changes in IQ over time (the Flynn effect).
[10] For example, he co-authored a 2006 study with James Flynn[11] showing that the black-white IQ gap in the United States had decreased in size by at least 25% between 1972 and 2002.
[8][12] He and Flynn had previously proposed a hypothesis for why IQ appears to be both highly heritable and significantly affected by the environment.