Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: State and local policies increasingly restrict access to job applicants’ criminal records, but without addressing the underlying reasons that employers conduct criminal background checks. Employers may thus still ask about an applicant’s criminal record later in the hiring process or make inaccurate judgments about an applicant’s criminal record based on demographic characteristics. In this paper, we use a field experiment conducted in partnership with a nationwide staffing platform to test a range of alternative policies that more directly address the reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks. The experiment asked hiring managers at nearly a thousand U.S. businesses to make actual hiring decisions under different randomized conditions. We find that 39% of businesses in our sample are willing to work with workers with a criminal record at baseline, which rises to over 50% when businesses are offered crime and safety insurance, a single performance review, a background check covering just the past year, or objective information on the productivity of these workers. Wage subsidies can achieve similar increases but at a substantially higher cost. Based on our findings, the staffing platform modified its user interface to relax the criminal background check requirement and offer crime and safety insurance.

Type of resource	text
Date created	August 12, 2021

Author	Cullen, Zoe
Author	Dobbie, Will
Author	Hoffman, Mitchell
Organizer of meeting	Exley, Christine
Organizer of meeting	Marquina, Alejandro Martínez
Organizer of meeting	Niederle, Muriel
Organizer of meeting	Roth, Alvin
Organizer of meeting	Vesterlund, Lise

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/yq338xd1909
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/yq338xd1909

Use and reproduction: User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).

Preferred citation: Cullen, Z., Dobbie, W., and Hoffman, M. (2022). Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/yq338xd1909

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