Har storleken någon betydelse? : En studie av den svenska aktiemarknadens reaktion på varsel om uppsägning av personal

Sammanfattning: Background: The reasons why this study is conducted is because of the latest recession in the global economy. The current recession has made a lot of companies more aware of its cost, and in order to fit the new harsher economic climate the companies has to be more cost efficient. In order to do so many companies choose to reduce their amount of employees. When this happens in a recession, most of the layoffs are an effect of reactive causes, such as lower incoming orders, and fewer customers. This leads to a problem for the companies that don’t know how these kinds of layoffs will affect the value of the company’s stock. This leads to a question whether there is a significant pattern between layoffs that are a result of reactive reasons and the number of employees that are being laid off, in percentage of the total number of employees of the companies in question? Purpose: The reason for this study is to find out if there is any correlation between how many employees that is laid off, in percentage of the company’s total employees, and if different percentages have different impact in the valuations of the company’s stock. Approach: This study is made in the form of a modified event study and narrows down to the recession during 2008-01-01 to 2009-10-01, and only involves companies that are on trade on the stock market in Stockholm Sweden. The objects that are involved in this study are from the stock markets large and mid-cap sections. The criteria for companies in this study are that they should have made layoffs for reactive reasons in the time period that we are interested in. The variations in the company’s stock are compared to Stockholm’s stock markets OMX-index. The information needed to conduct this study is gathered from press realises and from financial reports made by the companies. Result and conclusions: The study shows that there is a correlation between how large percentage of the company’s total employees that are laid off and the effect of variations in the stock. The correlation is -0,306 but it is not statistical verified. This result was not in line with our hypotheses that we had concluded from earlier research and theories that are in the study. Earlier research on the American stock market shows a stronger connection between large percentage layoffs and how this makes the stock value to decrease.