Déterminants de la structure financière des entreprises manufacturières au Maroc[What Determines Financial Structure in the Moroccan Manufacturing Sector? A Firm Level Analysis]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the determinants of financial structure in the Moroccan manufacturing firms. The paper contributes to the empirical literature on capital structure in developing countries. It relies on the data collected by the Firm Analysis and Competitiveness Survey (FACS) carried out in 2000 by the Ministry of trade and industry, and the World Bank. Our findings suggest that firms have relatively high debt ratios composed mainly of short maturity debt. However, their capital structure seems to match the nature of their assets in which tangible assets are underrepresented. Our empirical analysis uses four different measures of leverage and shows that the four main determinants of financial structure in the Moroccan manufacturing firms are the share of tangible assets in total assets, firm's age, its size, and the structure of its ownership. However, the nature of the relationship between these variables and leverage depends on the specific measure used and tends to differ with previous findings in the empirical literature.