Resizing The Organization 16. This book seeks to provide executives with useful insights, tools, guidelines, principles, and lessons learned about organizational transition and change. | CHAPTER 7 Financial Consequences of Employment-Change Decisions in Major . Corporations 1982-2000 Wayne F. Cascio Clifford E. Young In a previous study Cascio Young and Morris 1997 used data from the Standard Poor s S P 500 between 1980 and 1994 to examine 5 479 occurrences of changes in employment in terms of two dependent variables profitability return on assets and total return on common stock price appreciation plus dividend yield . The fundamental question that they addressed was whether corporate downsizing improves financial performance in the year of the event and in the two subsequent years following the implementation of changes in employment. In brief they found that companies that engaged in pure employment downsizing did not generate significantly higher returns on assets or stock returns than the average companies in their own industries. However companies that combined employment downsizing with asset restructuring generated higher returns on assets and stock returns than firms in their own industries. The study examined in this chapter uses the same methodology as the previous one but extends the previous study by considering a much larger sample all occurrences of employment changes in the 131 132 Resizing the Organization Standard Poor s 500 from 1982 to 2000. The larger sample size therefore provides a more stable estimate of the results reported in the previous study. As a basis for putting the current study into perspective we first provide a broad framework for the study of employment changes and then return to the more specific framework that we used to carry out our study. The Downsizing Juggernaut Continues The job churning in the labor market that characterized the 1990s has not subsided. If anything its pace has accelerated. Indeed the free-agent mentality that characterized the late 1990s is over. Layoffs are back and with a vengeance. In 2001 there were million announced layoffs and new ones seem to be announced every day Shadow
