Employers who perform background checks hire more black workers

A new study in the current issue of the Journal of Law and Economics finds that employers who choose to perform criminal background checks end up hiring more black workers – especially black men. Employers who systematically check criminal background during the hiring process are 8.4 percentage points more likely to have hired a black applicant into their most recently filled position.

"The results are consistent with the proposition that in the absence of a criminal background check, employers use race to infer past criminal activity, especially employers with a strong stated aversion to hiring ex-offenders," write Harry J. Holzer (Georgetown Public Policy Institute), Steven Raphael (University of California, Berkeley), and Michael A. Stoll (University of California, Los Angeles).