• economic growth
• industrial districts
• panel data

The district is a particular form of industrial organisation that the literature often associated with the success of SMEs in the Italian context at the time of strong economic growth, expecially in the past century.
In this thesis, I will ask the question whether the industrial district continues to remain nowadays a source of growth for companies, or if the district’s competitive advantage has declined over time.
To try to answer this question, I decided to analyse the employment growth inside and outside the district in different sectors, analyzing it from an econometric point of view through a Hausman and Taylor estimator (1981) with a control sample built before at national level and then restricted to a specific geographical area in the neighbourhood of the district by observing if the firm’s growth results effectively higher in the district area.