  "Banning the Box" refers to a policy campaign aimed at prohibiting employers
from soliciting applicant information that could be used to statistically
discriminate against categories of applicants (in particular, those with
criminal records). In this article, we examine how the concealing or revealing
of informative features about an applicant's identity affects hiring both
directly and, in equilibrium, by possibly changing applicants' incentives to
invest in human capital. We show that there exist situations in which an
employer and an applicant are in agreement about whether to ban the box.
Specifically, depending on the structure of the labor market, banning the box
can be (1) Pareto dominant, (2) Pareto dominated, (3) benefit the applicant
while harming the employer, or (4) benefit the employer while harming the
applicant. Our results have policy implications spanning beyond employment
decisions, including the use of credit checks by landlords and standardized
tests in college admissions.
