I was being hyperbolic about the ten year olds, but that's funny.
Correcting for it: I don't know. It would be very hard. You could try to control for variables like profitability, etc., but there are so many and you don't know what you don't know. But the correct response to absence of valid data isn't drawing conclusions from obviously bad data.
It just cracks me up that one paragraph later the author points out:
"Mass layoffs are often symptoms of unsound business strategies and don’t do anything to cure the larger problem."
and yet somehow didn't see that that sentence alone proves his previous one was pointless.
One big problem is layoffs cluster around events like the dot com bubble, the financial crisis, or covid, so there are weird things happening. You might be able to look at companies' quarterly profits to identify healthy companies that remained healthy, but still did layoffs.
