Over the last two decades, total factor productivity (TFP) in Italy decreased by 0.2% per year, while increasing on average in the Euro-area countries. This decline suggests the existence of large inefficiencies in the allocation of resources, making the Italian case particularly interesting and...

Using micro-data on firm-specific borrowing costs and wages, we demonstrate that distortions in firms' policies can be empirically measured using firm-level gaps between marginal revenue products and user costs (MRP-cost gaps). We estimate MRP-cost gaps for 4.7 million firm-year observations in...