Thank you @shariqueorg for including me, and @femonomics for starting #TweetABlackEconomistsPaper. I will discuss important work by @tacraigie, from which I learned a great deal, entitled “Ban the Box, Convictions, and Public Employment”. 1/10

“More than 100 million US adults have some type of criminal record (Sabol 2015)”, and there is ample evidence that a disproportionate percentage of these are Black and Brown (Bonczar 2003; Raphael and Stoll 2013). 2/10

Employment is essential for reintegration. However, employers use information such as prior convictions as a way to quickly screen/eliminate applicants. Ticking the “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” box in a job application will substantially lower call back rates. 3/10

“Ban The Box” or BTB policies propose “removing criminal history questions” and “postponing criminal background checks”. Besides asserting that convicted applicants have not been shown to perform differently, BTB can also contribute to (more) racial equity in hiring. 4/10

Since Black and Hispanic folks are disproportionately involved in the justice system, a prior conviction is even less likely to be a reasonable indicator of job performance in their case. But BTB policies may have unintended consequences. 5/10

Prior literature (Doleac&Hansen,2018;Agan&Starr,2017) found that private-sector employment of young minority males decreases following BTB policies. Why? Given asymetric information, employers infer likelihood of conviction based on their priors/biases *about all applicants*6/10

@tacraigie’s paper focuses on public sector employment, for which there was no prior evidence. The author uses individual-level data from 2005 to 2015 of the NLSY97 cohort. Using a DD approach on county-level implementation of BTB, and controlling for demographics… 7/10

results indicate that BTB raises the probability of public employment for those with convictions by 4 pp, which is 30% of the base rate! Moreover, using a triple difference design, @tacraigie finds no evidence of discrimination against minority male applicants following BTB. 8/10

Why does public employment seem to be less prone to the BTB unintended consequences? It is likely because “private sector widely accepts and practices employment-at-will, which may facilitate discriminatory practices against minorities”. 9/10

I highly recommend reading this paper for a thorough presentation of BTB implementation in the US, a much deeper discussion of the literature, and a careful robustness analysis of the results. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2906893 10/10