Great Places to Work®: Resilience in times of crisis

Abstract

We study the resilience of the 100 Best Companies to Work for in America in times of financial crises by analyzing their long-term financial performance. Apart from implementing methods that tackle the statistical problems of stock returns, we use a conditional model to measure financial performance in periods of market growth (bull markets) and market downturn (bear markets). We find that best places to work are indeed resilient in times of crisis since neither their financial performance nor their systematic risk are affected during bear markets: top companies continue to outperform the market during periods of crises, and the performance of lower-ranked great workplaces does not deteriorate. Moreover, we find that previous studies were overestimating performance, and only great workplaces on the top half of the rankings exhibit positive excessive returns.