Reassessing the capital structure of the largest Italian firms: Banks, markets and inter‑firm funding, 1950‑1970

Introduction The capital structure of enterprises is a rather obscure subject when it comes to assessing its precise composition and actual size, especially with regard to the distant past prior to the 1980s, as balance-sheet data are usually scarcely reliable and largely heterogeneous, both over time and across space. The very measure of capitalisation is rather problematic, not only because such a measure can clearly vary, even significantly over sectors, but essentially because empirical e..