Does government regulations protecting employee privacy hurt employment? The Impact of Salary History Bans on Employment

Abstract

There is a long-standing debate over the merits of confidential and transparent pay. Yet, as some states and counties in the U.S. have implemented policies that prohibit employers from asking about historical pay, many top tech companies such as Apple have introduced corresponding policies. In particular, this paper examines whether they have impacted employment. In this paper, we use the implementation of the salary history ban as a ”quasi-natural experiment” to assess the impact of the policy on employment using a staggered difference-in-differences method based on county-level panel data from 2013 to 2021. The study shows that the salary history ban does not significantly contribute to the increase in employment levels in general; even the implementation of the salary history ban reduces employment in local firms by an average of 1.04% relative to firms in areas where the policy is not implemented. This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of salary history bans and provides a reference for further improvements in corporate payroll management systems in practice.