Job applicants with criminal records are much less likely than others to obtain legitimate employment. Recent efforts to address this problem include campaigns to persuade employers to hire applicants with a record voluntarily and legislation such as Ban the Box laws. The success of any remedial strategy depends on whether employer concerns are founded on an accurate view of how employees with a criminal background behave on the job if hired. Little empirical evidence now exists to answer this question. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining firm-level hiring practices and worker-level performance outcomes. Our data indicate that individuals with criminal records have a much longer tenure and are less likely to quit their jobs voluntarily than other workers. Some results, however, differ by job: sales employees with a criminal record have a higher tendency than other workers to leave because of misconduct, while this effect is smaller and less significant for customer service workers. By examining psychometric data, we find evidence that bad outcomes for sales people with records may be driven by job rather than employee characteristics. We find some evidence that psychometric testing might provide a substitute for the use of criminal records, but that it would not in our own sample.

中文翻译：

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犯罪背景和工作表现

具有犯罪记录的求职者比其他人获得合法就业的可能性要小得多。解决这个问题的最新努力包括说服雇主自愿雇用具有记录的雇主的运动以及诸如禁箱法之类的立法。任何补救策略的成功与否，取决于雇主对问题的关注是否建立在对具有犯罪背景的员工在被雇用时的行为表现上的准确了解上。现在几乎没有经验证据可以回答这个问题。本文试图通过研究公司层面的招聘实践和员工层面的绩效结果来填补这一空白。我们的数据表明，拥有犯罪记录的人的任期更长，并且比其他工人更容易自愿辞职。但是，某些结果因工作而异：具有犯罪记录的销售员工由于不当行为而离开其他员工的趋势更高，而这种影响较小，并且对客户服务人员的影响较小。通过检查心理数据，我们发现有记录的销售人员的不良结果可能是由工作而不是员工特征驱动的。我们发现一些证据表明，心理测验可以替代犯罪记录的使用，但是在我们自己的样本中却不能。