I just read a fascinating and important new working paper, by Stan Veuger (AEI) and Daniel Shoag (Harvard), on “ban the box” initiatives, which seem like a promising way to increase employment among the formerly incarcerated, but about which we have little evidence. The paper also provides an instructive example of how unintended consequences can creep into public programs.
From the paper’s introduction:
Large numbers of employers in the United States, if not most, include questions along the lines of “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” in employment applications, or ask applicants to check a box to indicate that they have been convicted of a crime. Efforts to remove such questions gained steam over the last few decades as increasingly large numbers of Americans saw their chances of gainful employment limited by the interplay of mass incarceration and employers’ reluctance to hire convicts. In response, various jurisdictions, government agencies, and private-sector firms decided to eliminate questions about applicants’ criminal background or to mandate that employers do so, i.e., to “ban the box.”
Our goal in this paper is to study the effects of this latter response — bans on questions about criminal records (early on) in employee screening processes — on the labor market prospects of various affected groups and on the way in which employers respond to them. The mere recency of these bans means that research on their consequences has so far been quite limited. . . .
Our first central result is that these policies raise the employment of residents of the top quartile of high-crime neighborhoods by as much as 4%. This robust increase is in large part driven by residents getting hired into relatively high-income jobs (over $40,000 in annual wage income) and finding work in the public sector.
We then study a number of groups distinguished not by their place of residence, but by more permanent demographics. . . . [W]omen, who are less likely to have been convicted of crimes, see their labor market outcomes deteriorate, while low-skilled African Americans benefit. The most likely mechanism leading to worse employment outcomes from women is that employers raise their education and experience requirements in response to the elimination of questions concerning applicants’ criminal records. We study this mechanism using data on online job postings, and find “upskilling” does indeed occur after the implementation of Ban the Box measures.
(Bold mine.)