توسعه مالی محلی و عملکرد شرکت: شواهد از مراکش

Combining data from the Moroccan census of manufacturing enterprises with information from a commune survey, we test whether firm expansion is affected by local financial development. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis: local bank availability is robustly associated with faster growth for small and medium-size firms in sectors with growth opportunities, with a lower likelihood of firm exit and a higher likelihood of investment. Regarding the channel, the evidence suggests that, over the study period, access to credit was used by pre-existing Moroccan firms to mobilize investment funds, with some evidence that they were partly used towards reducing labor costs.

There is now a large empirical literature, going back to King and Levine (1993), showing that a country's financial development matters for firm performance and aggregate growth. What has received less attention is within-country heterogeneity with respect to the availability of financing. Asymmetric information and transaction cost considerations suggest that physical distance between lender and borrower is likely to affect access to finance (e.g. Petersen and Rajan, 2002). Indeed borrowers' actions are harder to observe when lender and borrower are far apart, leading to adverse selection (of potential borrowers) and moral hazard (for current borrowers). These issues are of particular importance in less developed economies, increasing the probability that local financial development matters for firm performance. This paper tests whether local financial development matters for firm growth in Morocco. To this end we combine data on bank availability at the local level with manufacturing census data over the period 1998 to 2003 to study the effect of bank availability on firm growth, entry, and exit. We find that value added grows faster in fast growing sectors for small and medium-size firms located near a bank, providing evidence for the importance of local financial development for small firm development.

In this paper we have combined data from the Moroccan census of manufacturing enterprises with information from a commune survey to examine whether firm expansion is affected by local bank availability. The five year period we study is characterized by a mild contraction in manufacturing employment among pre-existing firms, a feature that should be kept in mind when considering the external validity of our findings. Results show that, in sectors that are growing faster and where growth opportunities are thus expected to be stronger, bank availability is robustly associated with faster firm growth, both at the commune level, using aggregate data of the kind that is usually available in the cross industry/cross-country literature, as well as at the individual level. We also find some evidence of a lower likelihood of firm exit and larger likelihood of firm entry. Additionally, we provide evidence that the effect of bank availability is more significant for medium size firms and in less industrialized communes. Taken together, these findings indicate that bank availability is more critical for certain firms and for locations and sectors at the onset of industrial development.