 Leaving the past behind: Effects of clean slate regulation on employment and earningsKabir Dasgupta, Keshar Ghimire and Alexander Plum European Economic Review, 2025, vol. 175, issue C Abstract: We investigate the labor market implications of New Zealand’s clean slate initiative. The clean slate regulation allows automatic concealment of criminal records of previously convicted individuals who remain free of convictions for at least seven years (rehabilitation period) since their last sentence. We use detailed administrative data on criminal court charges to identify our sample of previously convicted individuals who are expected to have their criminal records automatically concealed upon completing their rehabilitation period. By linking our sample to high-frequency tax records including information on employment and earnings, we apply a difference-in-differences framework as well as models developed for staggered assignment of a treatment to study the causal mechanisms. Our analysis reveals that the clean slate reform did not affect eligible individuals’ employment propensity, but led to a modest but precisely estimated two-percent increase in monthly earnings of employed individuals. Keywords: Clean slate; Conviction; Employment; Earnings; Difference-in-Differences; Staggered treatment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:175:y:2025:i:c:s0014292125000650 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105015 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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