Do Criminal Record Remediation Policies Increase Employment?

Agan et al. (2025) ask whether clearing or sealing criminal records improves employment outcomes. They examine linked administrative court records from Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas merged with IRS tax data on earnings, employment, and gig work. They find that criminal charges—both convictions and non-convictions—are followed by large and persistent employment declines. However, removing records through Fair Credit Reporting Act rules or Clean Slate laws has little effect on traditional employment. Estimated effects on employment are near zero, with confidence intervals ruling out gains larger than about 0.2–0.4 percentage points. A notable exception is online gig work, which increases modestly after records are cleared.

Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist

This article addresses a policy issue of broad and persistent importance: how criminal records shape access to economic opportunity long after formal punishment ends. Questions about record remediation sit at the intersection of labor markets, administrative governance, and inequality, making the topic especially timely as states rapidly expand Clean Slate and record-sealing policies. The authors have written extensively on criminal records and labor market outcomes, and this study consolidates that body of work using unusually rich linked administrative and tax data. The dataset is high quality and well suited to measuring employment and earnings at scale, though generalizability beyond the studied states depends on institutional similarity. The design relies on credible quasi-experimental variation.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Agan, A., Garin, A., Koustas, D., Mas, A., & Yang, C. (forthcoming 2026). Can you erase the mark of a criminal record? Labor market impacts of criminal record remediation. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20240830 

Central Research Question

Central Research Question

This article asks whether clearing or sealing criminal records meaningfully improves labor market outcomes for individuals with prior criminal charges. The authors focus on whether record remediation policies—such as expungement, record sealing, and Clean Slate laws—translate into higher employment rates, increased earnings, or improved attachment to formal labor markets. The central issue is not whether criminal records are associated with worse outcomes, which is well established, but whether removing public access to those records is sufficient to reverse labor market penalties. The study also asks whether any observed effects differ across types of work, particularly between traditional payroll employment and alternative work arrangements such as online gig platforms.

Previous Literature

A large literature documents that criminal records substantially reduce employment prospects, earnings, and job stability. Audit studies and correspondence experiments show that employers are less likely to call back applicants with criminal records, even for minor or non-conviction offenses. Observational work using administrative data further demonstrates long-term scarring effects of criminal charges on employment trajectories. Prior research by several of the authors has been influential in establishing that non-conviction records alone can generate labor market penalties comparable to convictions. At the same time, evidence on remediation policies has been limited and mixed. Earlier studies often rely on survey data, small samples, or short follow-up periods, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about causal effects. This article builds on the existing literature by shifting attention from the presence of criminal records to the consequences of removing them, while using larger and more comprehensive administrative datasets than most prior work.

Data

The authors assemble a large linked administrative dataset combining criminal court records from multiple U.S. states with federal tax records. Court data include detailed information on charges, dispositions, convictions, non-convictions, and eligibility for record clearing under state law. These records are linked to Internal Revenue Service data that capture annual earnings, W-2 employment, self-employment income, and participation in online gig platforms reported on tax forms. The resulting dataset covers millions of individuals over multiple years, allowing the authors to track labor market outcomes before and after record remediation. The use of tax data provides a high-quality measure of formal labor market activity, though it necessarily excludes informal employment and under-the-table work. Overall, the dataset is unusually strong for studying labor market outcomes at scale and over time.

Methods

The analysis relies primarily on quasi-experimental research designs that exploit policy-driven variation in access to record remediation. In some cases, individuals become eligible for expungement or sealing based on sharp statutory criteria, such as the passage of time since disposition or the absence of subsequent offenses. The authors compare labor market outcomes before and after records are cleared, and across individuals who become eligible at different times. They employ difference-in-differences and event-study frameworks to estimate changes in employment and earnings associated with record remediation. While the study does not use randomized controlled trials, the designs are intended to approximate causal inference by leveraging plausibly exogenous changes in record visibility. The methods are transparent and well executed, though causal interpretation still depends on the assumption that eligibility timing is not correlated with unobserved changes in labor market prospects.

Findings/Size Effects

The authors find that criminal charges are followed by large and persistent declines in employment and earnings, confirming earlier work on labor market scarring. However, clearing or sealing records produces surprisingly small effects on traditional employment. Estimated impacts on W-2 employment and earnings are close to zero, and the confidence intervals rule out effects larger than roughly 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points in employment rates. These results suggest that record remediation alone does not substantially restore access to standard payroll jobs. In contrast, the authors find modest but measurable increases in participation in online gig work following record clearing. These effects are statistically significant but economically small, indicating that some individuals shift toward alternative work arrangements when records are removed. Overall, the size effects are far smaller than advocates of remediation policies might expect based on the documented harms of criminal records themselves.

Conclusion

This article makes a significant contribution by carefully distinguishing between the harms caused by criminal records and the benefits of removing them. The findings suggest that while criminal records impose real and lasting labor market penalties, record remediation policies by themselves do not substantially reverse those outcomes in traditional employment sectors. The study highlights the possibility that employer behavior, informal information channels, or broader structural factors limit the effectiveness of record clearing. The high-quality administrative data and credible quasi-experimental designs strengthen confidence in the results. More broadly, the article reframes policy debates by showing that reducing formal barriers is not necessarily sufficient to restore economic opportunity, underscoring the need for a more complete understanding of how criminal justice contact shapes labor markets.