Work, Crime, and the Consequences of Criminal Records: Causal Evidence on Labor Market Impacts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel discusses the relationship between the criminal justice system and labor market success.   

The first presentation measures the impact of job loss and unemployment insurance on criminal behavior and social welfare.  Comparing a sample of workers impacted by mass layoff events across the United States to those who were not laid off, it shows that workers who experience layoff suffer large earnings losses and higher criminal legal system contact, particularly felony charging outcomes. It explores how changes to unemployment compensation design mediate these effects. Using a simulated instrument approach, it shows that job losers exposed to more generous replacement rates have lower offending and modest changes in employment. It also finds that moving to an employer environment with a one-standard-deviation higher post-layoff filing tendency increases successful claiming and reduces offending.  

The second presentation measures the impact background check adjudication on labor market outcomes for individuals with and without criminal records.  In collaboration with a large online services marketplace that conducts criminal background checks on all providers seeking entry to the platform, the authors implement a randomized experiment that suppresses a set of non-violent criminal charges for randomly selected applicants, increasing platform access by 3.3 percentage points (5%) among applicants with criminal records. Cross-sectional comparisons show that workers with criminal records generate lower customer engagement and higher rates of adverse customer incidents. Yet, local average treatment effect estimates from the experiment show that randomly admitted marginal service providers perform no worse than average on either dimension, meaning that marginal applicants screened out by criminal records are not less productive or riskier than the average service provider admitted onto the platform. 

The third presentation investigates the effect of exposure to violence on incarceration, income, and upward mobility.  It exploits the variation in community exposure to the crack epidemic, and finds that emerging crack markets led to an increase in violence, disproportionately impacting younger Black males. The results indicate that Black males born between 1978 and 1983 who experienced high levels of violence during their youth exhibit a reduction in upward mobility. Additionally, It finds that exposure to violence has no impact on male incarceration or female mobility, but does increase teenage pregnancy among Black females while decreasing it among White females. Lastly, exposure to violence reduces the likelihood of marriage across the parental income distribution. 

Finally, the fourth presentation discusses the impacts of misdemeanor prosecution on a broad swath of socioeconomic outcomes of defendants and their families, including criminal recidivism, labor market outcomes, social safety net usage, mortality, and mental well-being.  It combines a rich linkage of administrative and survey data, to first estimate event studies of how labor market outcomes and poverty status evolve around misdemeanor charges and convictions for defendants in 11 states in the United States. Second, it estimate the causal impact of a misdemeanor conviction (relative to being charged) using a regression discontinuity design generated by unanticipated budget cuts and changes in prosecutorial priority that sharply reduced misdemeanor conviction rates in seven counties across five states.

Policy Area

• Crime, Justice, and Drugs

Chair

• Anne M. Burton, University of Texas, Dallas

Discussants

• Luke David Brinkman, Pennsylvania State University

• Ethan James Ellis, University of Minnesota

Organizer

• Michael LaForest-Tucker, George Washington University

Individual Presentations

• Job Displacement, Crime, and the Value of Unemployment Insurance in the U.S. - Presenting Author: Benjamin David Pyle, Boston University

• An Experiment in Background Check Adjudication - Presenting Author: Amanda Yvonne Agan, Cornell University

• The Socioeconomic Consequences of Misdemeanor Conviction - Presenting Author: James Reeves, University of Colorado Denver; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Nikhil Rao, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

• Effects of Incarceration on Employment and Earnings: The Mediating Role of Education - Presenting Author: Ethan James Ellis, University of Minnesota