Doleac said that in the United States, criminal history is highly correlated with race, age and education level. Because young, low-skilled black and Hispanic men are statistically more likely to have a recent conviction or incarceration than other groups, Doleac said, those correlations tend to make employers avoid interviewing applicants within those groups.

While the findings run contrary to the intent of ban the box policies, Doleac said that when she first heard of the practice, she immediately thought that it had the potential for “unintended consequences.”

“When I first heard about ban the box, it struck me that this would likely lead to classic cases of statistical discrimination,” Doleac said. “When you don’t have some information that you really want about someone, you use characteristics that you can observe to guess or infer something about the characteristic you actually care about.”

After measuring employment rates in areas around the country that had adopted the policy, and incorporating controls for various other aspects that could affect those rates, Doleac and Hansen found their hypothesis to be correct for young, low-skilled black and Hispanic men.