Sample selection
Initially our sample consisted of 30 largest companies of every year listed on Stockholm
Stock Exchange (SSE) during 2004-2008 period without financial and utility sector
companies as their regulation environment is quite specific. As our study is on Sweden
we removed the companies that have their headquarters out of Sweden. Several
companies were also eliminated because of limitations to find data. Sample companies
are listed in Table 2. The selected research method is cross sectional (Bryman and Bell,
2007) which implies using in a study sample data from different cases (in our case having
different sample companies every year). For every year we took the companies with the
largest market capitalization. Market capitalization was calculated through multiplying
number of companies’ shares outstanding at year end and their year-end stock price
which was taken from NASDAQ OMX website.