> In general, the study found that both downsized and nondownsized companies reported positive financial outcomes during this period. The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing. By the third year, these differences became statistically nonsignificant.
But in the absence of layoffs perhaps those companies would have done worse. Therefore we could easily argue that this does not contradict the claim that layoffs do work. In particular layoffs are not meant to make a company grow faster than other companies, they are meant to prevent extreme bloat and inefficiency and get back to a normal baseline. So if we assume that context the data makes more sense.