The paper analyzes how production and financial networks among firms affect their capacity to face financial shocks. A simple model is built up to investigate how firm-specific risks of default are allocated in the network, and how this allocation changes firms’ default proba- bilities. The network works as a “risk-sharing” mechanism providing it is both strongly connected and symmetric, a case toward which indus- trial districts can be claimed to converge but under certain conditions. Furthermore, the resort to “risk-sharing” does not guarantee the firms to reduce their default probability in the network, unless the aver- age shock they face is lower than their financial capacity. Industrial districts might have a comparative disadvantage in front of “heavy” financial crisis such as the current one.