License to Layoff? Unemployment Insurance and the Moral Cost of Layoffs
研究提出道德成本是约束企业裁员的新因素，利用失业保险扩张作为准自然实验，发现其降低了经理人的道德成本，从而允许更大规模裁员，且效果因CEO的亲社会偏好和外部压力而异。
This study presents moral cost as a novel behavioral constraint on firm resource adjustment, specifically layoff decisions that can cause severe harm to employees. Revising the prevailing negative view of managers as purely self-interested, we propose that managers care about their employees and incur moral cost from layoffs. We leverage expansions in unemployment insurance as a quasi-natural experiment that reduces economic hardship for laid-off workers and, in turn, the moral cost of layoffs to managers. We find that these expansions license larger layoffs. The effects are stronger for chief executive officers (CEOs) with stronger prosocial preferences who dismiss fewer workers despite low performance, such as non-Republican, internally promoted, small town, or family firm CEOs, and weaker for CEOs who lack the discretion to avoid moral cost due to shareholder or financial pressures. Our findings suggest that the role of moral cost is substantial but also highly heterogeneous and readily suppressed by external pressures. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16734 .