Italian Firms in History: Size, Technology and Entrepreneurship

This article sets the background for the contributions collected in this issue, comments on the statistical data and discusses the chronology of Italy's economic history in a long-term macroeconomic perspective. The following topics are addressed: the rise in productive capacity; structural change and the periodization of challenges and responses. Data concerning the main macroeconomic indicators are collected in a short Appendix, together with concise information about their sources.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2010

The purpose of the Economic History Working Papers (Quaderni di Storia economica) is to promote the circulation of preliminary versions of working papers on growth, finance, money, institutions prepared within the Bank of Italy or presented at Bank seminars by external speakers with the aim of stimulating comments and suggestions. The present series substitutes the Historical Research papers-Quaderni dell'Ufficio Ricerche Storiche. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors and do not involve the responsibility of the Bank.

in D. De ruysscher, A. Cordes, S. Dauchy, H. Pihlajamäki (ed.), The Company in Law and Practice: Did Size Matter? (Middle Ages-Nineteenth Century), Brill, 2017, p. 203-218

2012

This article reconsiders the growth of Italian industry from the First World War to the eve of the economic miracle, with the aid of sector-specific new value-added series, at three different price-bases. The new estimates reduce growth during the First World War, making the Italian case comparable to the other belligerent countries, while improving the performance of the 1920s. The 1929 crisis looks more profound than before, while the recovery after 1933 is now stronger. During the 1920s and the 1930s, a significant shift ...

2015

The firms’ size distribution in the Italian Golden age has been described as a successful example of the adoption of the big business model which is characterized by large firms able to exploit the economies of scale of the modern technologies. Two main questions are present in literature: was it enough or could have been done better? Are the two decades homogeneous? The paper tries to answer to these questions observing a panel of a Core of firms, estimating their changing of size distribution and the tendency to upsize, by the Mover-Stayer model. The upsizing of firms emerges clearly, considering the distribution among the size classes in the years 1950, 1960 and 1970, the transition matrices and directional index which shows a rate of growth more than considerable and a strong tendency to upsizing of firms in every class. Moreover, the equilibrium distribution is characterized by a relevant increase of the frequencies in the last two classes. A slowdown of the growth of the size ...

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2008

Business History, 2015

Until the Banking reform in 1936, banks and industrial companies in Italy were strongly intertwined (both in terms on ownership and interlocking directorates). Using Imita.db -a large a dataset containing data on over 300,000 directors of Italian joint stock companies -this paper analyses what would have happened to the Italian corporate network in the years 1913, 1921, 1927 and 1936 if the "mixed banks" and their directors would have not been there. Our experiments show that new centers of the system would have emerged (financial and electricity and phone companies), confirming the interconnected nature of the Italian capitalism. We also analyze two industries, textiles and iron and steel, characterized by different labor-to-capital intensities to check for sectoral differences. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that local banks were important in funding both industries. Overall we call into question the role of mixed banks.

2015

Francesca Carnevali’s work stressed the key role of politics and institutions in determining a country’s banking structure, which in turn shapes its industrial structure. Segmented banking systems in France, Germany and Italy allowed different types of banks to specialize in different market segments, ensuring the fulfilment of smaller firms’ financial requirements. In Britain, local banks did not survive the wave of amalgamation of the 1960s. This void left smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and banks facing high transaction costs on the credit market due to little – or even an absence of – knowledge of the local business environment. Focusing on the Italian case this paper discusses how major parties in the political spectrum, as well as economic institutions such as the Bank of Italy, agreed to foster SMEs after the Second World War. This led to the establishment of a segmented banking system, in which local banks were preserved to serve the financial needs of SMEs clustere...

2007

Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought, 2019

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

2006

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

2009

The series Occasional Papers presents studies and documents on issues pertaining to the institutional tasks of the Bank of Italy and the Eurosystem. The Occasional Papers appear alongside the Working Papers series which are specifically aimed at providing original contributions to economic research. The Occasional Papers include studies conducted within the Bank of Italy, sometimes in cooperation with the Eurosystem or other institutions. The views expressed in the studies are those of the authors and do not involve the responsibility of the institutions to which they belong.

2015

Commissioned by Matteo Pretelli Debating Italy's "Modern Economic Growth": A Quantitative History The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy since Unification, edited by Gianni Toniolo, is the result of a collective research on Italy's "modern economic growth" conducted by Italian and international scholars, as well as members of the research departments of the Bank of Italy, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the country's political unification. Based on the papers presented at the international conference "Italy and the World Economy, 1861-2011" hosted by the Bank of Italy in October 2011, the volume is composed of twenty-one chapters, most of which are coauthored by both Italian and non-Italian authors; a rich final bibliography; and some eighty-five pages of quantitative data on the Italian economy since 1861. As stressed by the editor (p. 4), such data are the fresh findings of recent quantitative research in a number of fields, and include new statistics on national accounts, productivity, and welfare indicators, as well as new measures of various economically relevant factors ranging from firm size to the efficiency of the banking system. Most of the chapters are organized as commentaries to such new data sets, so that the volume carries a declared emphasis on cliometric analysis.

H-Net Reviews, 2015

The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy since Unification, edited by Gianni Toniolo, is the result of a collective research on Italy's “modern economic growth” conducted by Italian and international scholars, as well as members of the research departments of the Bank of Italy, on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the country's political unification. Based on the papers presented at the international conference “Italy and the World Economy, 1861-2011” hosted by the Bank of Italy in October 2011, the volume is composed of twenty-one chapters, most of which are coauthored by both Italian and non-Italian authors; a rich final bibliography; and some eighty-five pages of quantitative data on the Italian economy since 1861. As stressed by the editor (p. 4), such data are the fresh findings of recent quantitative research in a number of fields, and include new statistics on national accounts, productivity, and welfare indicators, as well as new measures of various economica...