The Role of Infrastructure, Firms’ Efficiency and their Survival: Evidence from a Combined Productivity-duration Approach

Being able to forecast firms’ decline is paramount in economics. In this paper, we investigate the main factors that lead companies to failure. By tracking a sample of agri-food firms in Italy, we compare different and very innovative inefficiency indicators with the most important and established financial variables in the literature. The inefficiency measures proposed account for the level of an infrastructural endowment at a territorial level. Through a semi-parametric approach, this paper demonstrates that infrastructures influence the e of firms, which in turn is the main determinant of firms’ survival. This has strong policy and managerial implications.