Employment Protection and Venture Capital Investment: The Impact of Wrongful Discharge Laws
研究发现美国各州通过不当解雇法（最强形式为诚信例外）后，风险投资显著下降，尤其在劳动密集型行业，表明就业保护增加了初创企业的财务困境成本。
Wrongful discharge laws (WDLs) provide limits to the employment-at-will doctrine, and thus impair operating flexibility, increasing expected financial distress costs by making it costly to fire employees. This impairment is detrimental to start-ups, leading to a decline in venture capital (VC) investment. Using a difference-in-differences framework enabled by the staggered adoption of WDLs across the U.S. states, we show VC investment declines after a state adopts the good faith exception (the strongest form of WDL). This decline is most pronounced in sectors with high labor dependency. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01936 .