| If employers consistently conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, they are more likely to hire African-American workers — especially men — than employers who don’t conduct such checks. Conversely, employers that do not conduct such checks are more likely to discriminate at least statistically, against African-American applicants.
The new study, published by the Journal of Law and Economics, found that employers who systematically run criminal background checks during the hiring process are 8.4 percentage points more likely to have hired an African-American applicant to fill their most recent 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.
Using a multi-city survey of more than 3,000 establishments in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, the researchers discovered that employers who are more reluctant to hire ex-offenders were also more likely to statistically discriminate against African-American applicants. |
