There is still little consensus on the effectiveness of business support policies. The empirical evaluation is complicated by the difficulty in achieving reliable identification. We analyse the impact of Law 488/92, the main Italian regional policy. We propose a new approach, named multiple...

The paper analyses the causal effect of capital subsidies on firms' efficiency and productivity by exploiting the conditions for a local random experiment created by Law 488/92 (henceforth L488), which has been an important policy instrument for reducing territorial disparities in Italy. The...