Spatial agglomeration and business groups: new evidence from Italian industrial districts

4. The empirical evidence

Now let us illustrate our empirical findings. The first result concerns the presence of
business groups within Italian industrial districts. Our evidence tends to give an empirical
validation of Proposition 1, i.e. that business groups are more widespread in industrial
districts than outside them. This hypothesis is generally confirmed when we consider the
firms (columns 1 and 2 of Table 2 and 3), but not always when we consider the share of
employees (columns 3 and 4 of Table 2 and 4). In particular, columns 1 and 2 of Table 2
suggest that passing from non-district to district LLSs the share of firms belonging to
business groups tends to increase. This finding appears to be reinforced when we take into
account only firms specialized in the district sector. In fact, in this case the share of firms
belonging to business groups is higher than in the two previous cases. The greater
incidence of business groups within the Italian industrial districts is further confirmed by
Table 3, where the analysis takes into account industrial districts by sector of activity.

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