Ban the Box, Convictions, and Public Sector Employment

The Persistent Effect of Temporary Affirmative Action

“…6 Kurtulus (2016) is the first to consider the potentially dynamic effects of the regulation on employment, an important innovation. 7 Building on this insight, a primary contribution of the present paper is to focus on the dynamic effects of regulation, particularly for temporarily regulated employers, and to consider the implications that persistence may have for identification. I show that, in the presence of the type of persistence documented here, research designs applied in the existing literature will substantially understate the causal impact of regulation.…”

How Do Employers Use Compensation History?: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…The information about particular candidates in manipulated, and the key outcome is typically the characteristics of workers that are calledback or hired (Goldin and Rouse, 2000;Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004;Autor and Scarborough, 2008;Dobbie et al, 2019). Although the intent of some information-removing policies is to counteract discrimination, a potential down-side is that they may encourage a reliance on other signals, which in turn might harm the very workers the policies are designed to help (Agan and Starr, 2017;Doleac and Hansen, 2018;Craigie, 2017;Shoag and Veuger, 2016). Furthermore, removing information might potentially cause a reduction in hiring altogether if the process becomes too costly relative to the expected benefits.…”

Dismantling Institutional and Structural Racism: Implementation Strategies Across the United States

“…As of October 2021, 37 states and over 150 counties and cities have enacted laws or adopted policies that ban the box (Avery and Lu 2021). 7 Although compliance with these mandates shows some inconsistency, in some ban the box jurisdictions, employment of Black or Latinx males (ex-offenders) increased, at least in government jobs (see, e.g., Jackson andZhao 2017 andCraigie 2020). Other studies found evidence that ban the box laws resulted in employers discriminating against young, low-skilled Black or Latinx men, in that employers assumed in the absence of criminal record information, that they had a criminal past (see, e.g., Agan and Starr 2016;Barthel 2019;Doleac and Hansen 2020).…”