  We study the effect of Chile's Employment Protection Law (Ley de Protecci\'on
del Empleo, EPL), a law which allowed temporal suspensions of job contracts in
exceptional circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the fulfillment of
firms' expectations regarding layoffs. We use monthly surveys directed at a
representative group of firms in the national territory. This panel data allows
to follow firms through time and analyze the match between their expectations
and the actual realization to model their expectation fulfilment. We model the
probability of expectation fulfilment through a logit model that allows for
moderation effects. Results suggest that for those firms that expected to fire
workers, for the firms that used the EPL, the odds they finally ended up with a
job separation are 50% of the odds for those that did not used the EPL. Small
firms increase their probability of expectation fulfilment in 11.9% when using
the EPL compared to large firms if they declared they were expecting to fire
workers.
