Specificità finanziarie delle medie imprese italiane: un’analisi del campione Mediobanca-Unioncamere

The aim of this paper is to offer some empirical insights on the financial decisions of the Italian medium-size firms (hereafter, MSEs) in terms of their capital structure strategy, analyzing the factors that affect this strategy, including the effect of their being part of industrial districts, and its impact on risk and performance. The analysis identifies a peculiar profile of the Italian manufacturing MSEs, compared with the larger companies operating in the same industries, which shows that the medium size does not configure a temporary state in the small-to-large continuum, but rather a well-defined "business pattern", in terms of business strategy and relevant key success factors, risk-taking behavior, ownership and financial structure, which takes advantage of both specialization (within the production chain) and operating flexibility. Therefore, the paper carries out an empirical comparison between the leading manufacturing companies and their medium counterparts (both profiles coming from the Mediobanca-Unioncamere datasets) during the 1996-2001 period, distinguishing also the MSEs operating in industrial districts from their non-district counterparts.