Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Ban-the-box (BTB) policies prevent employers from asking job applicants about their criminal history until very late in the hiring process. The intent of these policies is to help ex-offenders find employment by reducing the stigma associated with arrest or conviction. Some of the existing literature on BTB (Agan and Starr 2018, Doleac and Hansen 2019), however, finds that these policies lead to statistical discrimination against groups with higher incidences of arrest and conviction. This paper studies whether these negative unintended consequences spill over into jurisdictions bordering those with BTB policies. Using the 2004-2014 waves of the Current Population Survey, we estimate reduced-form difference-in-differences models where the identifying variation is the passage of a ban-the-box policy in a neighboring jurisdiction. We find that wages for young, low-skilled black and Hispanic men decrease following the passage of BTB in neighboring labor markets. We explore several mechanisms that might explain these spillovers, including changes in monopsony (wage-setting) power and changes in job search due to statistical discrimination. To measure changes in job search, we use the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) to estimate the impact of ban-the-box policies on the likelihood of working in non-ban-the-box jurisdictions but residing in ban-the-box jurisdictions.