(Amy Cavenaile/The Washington Post; iStock)

By Jeff Guo

If you have bad credit, good luck finding a job. According to a 2012 survey, 47 percent of employers said they run credit checks on applicants. Many hiring managers believe that a troubled financial history signals untrustworthiness, or a defective work ethic, so they weed out job-seekers with stains on their credit reports.

This probably doesn't make sense. Studies find little evidence that possessing a clean financial record has anything to do being a good worker. Medical debt, not credit card debt, is the top reason that people file for bankruptcy. When employers regularly reject applicants bearing the scars of financial distress, poverty becomes an airtight trap.

For these reasons, one of the hottest ideas among lawmakers right now is to ban employers from running credit checks on job applicants. Since 2007, eleven states, as well as Chicago and New York City, have passed such laws.

Supporters of these restrictions often frame the issue as a civil rights problem. In particular, they say, credit checks impede employment among minorities, who disproportionately have low credit scores.

When employers screen for credit histories, "it locks people out of jobs in ways that simply make no sense," New York City Council Member Brad Lander, the main sponsor of the city’s measure, said in April. "In the big picture, that also adds up to discrimination against communities of color and low income people."

But a new study from Robert Clifford, an economist at the Boston Fed, and Daniel Shoag, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, finds that when employers are prohibited from looking into people’s financial history, something perverse happens: African-Americans become more likely to be unemployed relative to others.