评论
打印
Business
商业版块
Bartleby
巴托比栏目
Waging war on recessions
对经济衰退宣战
An early analysis of Denmark’s furlough scheme
丹麦休假计划初探
Since the emergence of the welfare state, adults who want to work have generally found themselves in one of two positions: earning a wage from their job or receiving unemployment benefits. The pandemic has led many people to find themselves in a halfway stage— furlough. This often involves the state paying a large slice of employees’wages so that firms can keep them on the payroll during the lockdown.
自从福利国家出现以来，想要工作的成年人通常会发现自己面临以下两种处境：工作赚取收入或者领取失业救济金。而这场疫情却导致很多人发现自己处于中间阶段——休假。这通常涉及国家支付员工很大一部分工资，这样企业就可以在疫情封锁期间保留员工岗位。
How effective is this approach? A new paper by Morten Bennedsen of INSEAD business school in France and colleagues surveyed 8,781 Danish firms with anywhere between three and 2,000 employees. Around two-thirds of the firms said that the effect of the pandemic on their revenues had been negative, or very negative. Of those companies that had experienced a fall in revenues, the median decline was 35%.
这种方法效果如何？法国欧洲工商管理学院 (INSEAD) 的莫顿·本尼森和他的同事在一篇新发表的论文中对8781家丹麦公司进行了调查，其中这些公司的员工人数在3至2000人。大约三分之二的公司表示，疫情对公司收入造成了负面，或者说是极其负面的影响。那些收入下降的公司中，平均下降幅度在35%。
The Danish government offered a variety of financial-aid programmes to firms, including a furlough scheme which paid 75% of salary costs (subject to a cap) to eligible companies. The academics found that 56% of the firms surveyed had taken some form of government aid and this was true of almost all businesses that had suffered a revenue decline of more than 50%. Unsurprisingly, companies in the most distressed industries were most likely to have taken assistance.
丹麦政府已向公司提供了各类的金融援助项目，包括一项休假计划，即对符合条件的公司，政府会支付其75%的工资费用（有上限）。学者们发现，在接受调查的公司中有56%已经接受了某种形式的政府援助，几乎所有收入下降幅度超过50%的企业都是如此。不出所料，行业处境最困难的公司最有可能接受援助。
The aid seemed to work. Firms that received it laid off fewer workers and furloughed more people than firms which received no aid at all. But, as the authors of the study point out, this definition of success might be subject to a selection bias—firms that wanted to furlough workers may have been likelier to apply for aid.
援助似乎奏效了。与根本没有接受援助的公司相比，接受政府援助的公司裁员更少，休假员工更多。但是正如研究报告的作者指出的那样，这种对于成功的定义可能会受到一种选择性偏差的影响——那些想让员工休假的公司可能更倾向于申请援助。
So they also asked firms a counterfactual question: what decisions would they have taken had they been unable to get aid? On this basis, the researchers estimate that taking the aid increased a firm’s furloughed workers as a share of its total workforce by about 20 percentage points, and decreased the share of laid-off workers by almost the same amount.
因此，他们也会向公司提出一个反事实的问题：如果无法获得政府援助，他们会做出什么样的决定？在此基础上，研究人员估计，接受援助使公司的休假员工占其总劳动力的比例提高了约20个百分点，而裁员数量所占的比例下降了几乎相同的百分点。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
