This paper investigates the effects of uncertainty on the investment decisions of a sample of Italian manufacturing firms, using information on the subjective probability distribution of future demand for firms' products according to the entrepreneurs. The results support the view that uncertainty weakens the response of investment to demand thus slowing down capital accumulation. Consistent with the predictions of the theory, there is considerable heterogeneity in the effect of uncertainty on investment: it is stronger for firms that cannot easily reverse investment decisions and for those with substantial market power. We show that the negative effect of uncertainty on investment cannot be explained by uncertainty proxying for liquidity constraints.

We use variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer–employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. We find that firms operating in less financially developed markets offer lower entry wages but faster wage growth than firms in more financially developed markets. This helps firms finance their operations by implicitly raising funds from workers. We control for local market fixed effects and only exploit time variation in the degree of local financial development induced by an exogenous liberalization, so that the effect we find is unlikely to reflect unobserved local factors that systematically affect wage–tenure profiles. We estimate that the amount of credit generated by implicit lending within the firm is economically important and can be as large as 30 percent of the bank lending. Consistent with credit market imperfections opening up trade opportunities within the firm, we find that the internal rate of return of implicit loans lies between the rate at which workers savings are remunerated in the market and the rate that firms pay on their loans from banks.

We study the effects of differences in local financial development within an integrated financial market. We construct a new indicator of financial development by estimating a regional effect on the probability that, ceteris paribus, a household is shut off from the credit market. By using this indicator, we find that financial development enhances the probability an individual starts his own business, favors entry of new firms, increases competition, and promotes growth. As predicted by theory, these effects are weaker for larger firms, which can more easily raise funds outside of the local area. These effects are present even when we instrument our indicator with the structure of the local banking markets in 1936, which, because of regulatory reasons, affected the supply of credit in the following 50 years. Overall, the results suggest local financial development is an important determinant of the economic success of an area even in an environment where there are no frictions to capital movements.