About

Amanda Agan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Cornell University. Her research lies at the intersections of economics, law, and public policy, with a particular focus on the economics of crime and labor market discrimination. Her work studies the consequences and determinants of criminal legal involvement, examining how various policies can influence the incentives of defendants, criminal justice actors, and individuals with records, especially in relation to labor market opportunities. Additionally, she investigates sources of discrimination in the labor market and other spheres, as well as policies aimed at constraining its impacts. Prior to her current position at Cornell, she served as an Associate Professor of Economics at Rutgers University and was a post-doctoral research associate in the Economics Department and the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2013 and holds a B.A. in Economics from George Mason University. Her academic contributions include research published in leading journals, and she teaches courses such as Empirical Strategies for Policy Analysis and Law, Economics, and Public Policy.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Management
• Economics
• Political Science
• Demographic economics
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Demography
• Law
• Social psychology
• Actuarial science
• Business
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Automating Automaticity: Online Lab Experiments

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-05-02

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prosecutorial Reform and Local Crime Rates

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Automating Automaticity: Online Lab Experiments

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-05-02

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Can you Erase the Mark of a Criminal Record? Labor Market Impacts of Criminal Record Remediation

  CrimRxiv · 2025-02-12 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We investigate whether removing a previously-obtained criminal record improves employment outcomes. We estimate the causal impact of criminal record remediation laws that have been widely enacted with the goal of improving employment opportunities for millions of individuals with records. We find consistent evidence that removing an existing record does not improve labor market outcomes, on average. A notable exception is participation in gig work through online platforms, which often screen workers based on their records but not their employment histories. The evidence is consistent with records initially scarring labor market trajectories in a way that is difficult to undo later.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit

  American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 2025-06-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters evaluating over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates' disclosures for male and female applicants. Our findings suggest that extra dollars disclosed yield higher salary offers, willingness to pay, and perceptions of outside options by recruiters (all similarly for men and women). Recruiters make negative inferences about the quality and bargaining positions of nondisclosing candidates, though they penalize silent women less. (JEL C93, D82, J22, J23, J31)

  PublisherDOI

• Automating Automaticity: Online Lab Experiments

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-05-02

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prosecutorial Reform and Local Crime Rates

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-10-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many communities across the United States have elected reform-minded prosecutors who seek to safely reduce the reach and burden of the criminal justice system.In this paper, we use variation in the timing of when these prosecutors took office across jurisdictions to empirically characterize their policy changes and estimate downstream effects on prison incarceration rates, local reported crime rates, and drug mortality rates.We find that after a reform prosecutor takes office there are consistent and often statistically significant decreases in charging and conviction rates for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, particularly misdemeanor drug offenses, but not for violent or felony offenses.We find little to no downstream effects on prison incarceration rates and no effects on local reported crime rates or drug mortality rates.These findings suggest that the types of policies being implemented by reform prosecutors appear to be decreasing the footprint of the criminal justice system without adverse effects on public safety.

  PublisherDOI

• Automating Automaticity: Online Lab Experiments

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-05-02

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Can you Erase the Mark of a Criminal Record? Labor Market Impacts of Criminal Record Remediation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Labor Market Impacts of Reducing Felony Convictions

  American Economic Review Insights · 2024-08-30 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study the labor market impacts of retroactively reducing felonies to misdemeanors in San Joaquin County, California, where criminal justice agencies implemented Proposition 47 reductions in a quasi-random order, without requiring input or action from affected individuals. Linking records of reductions to administrative tax data, we find employment benefits for individuals who (likely) requested their reduction, consistent with selection, but no benefits among the larger subset of individuals whose records were reduced proactively. A field experiment notifying a subset of individuals about their proactive reduction also shows null results, implying that lack of awareness is unlikely to explain our findings. (JEL C93, H76, J22, K14, K42)

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer L. Doleac

  Arnold Ventures

  16 shared

• Anna Harvey

  15 shared

• Michael D. Makowsky

  Clemson University

  14 shared

• Laura Gee

  Tufts University

  14 shared

• Sonja B. Starr

  14 shared

• Matthew Freedman

  12 shared

• Emily Owens

  12 shared

• Bo Cowgill

  10 shared