The sample of 275 firms is split into two subsets by cluster analysis. 177 companies,
equal to 64.36% of the sample, belong to the subset of sound firms, whereas 98 companies, equal
to 35.64%, are classified as firms in financial distress. Table 2 shows some statistics about the
ratios coming from the banks’ internal records and the Italian Credit Registry records, which are
used to implement cluster analysis