THE NEW CERIS PANEL ON ITALIAN FIRMS 1977-1997

The new CERIS panel on Italian firms covers the period from 1977 to 1997. The panel is unbalanced and includes 1710 manufacturing firms with at least five consecutive years. It contains condensed balance sheet and profit and loss data (collected from Mediobanca annual directory "Le Principali Società Italiane") as well as and firm-level information (e.g. primary industry, ultimate ownership, group affiliation, location, foundation year, stock market listing) and sectoral data for the firm’s primary industry (e.g. production and price indexes, turnover, etc.). For each firm the stock of capital at replacement cost has been computed following the perpetual inventory technique. This paper outlines the methodology followed to construct the final panel to be used in applications and describes the content of each variable. Finally, a number of descriptive tables illustrate the main characteristics of the database.