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Like the entrenched managers who manage to keep their positions despite corporate governance mechanisms, this paper aims to develop our understanding of the LSPs entrenchment process in business relationships, its initial conditions and its generative mechanisms by mobilizing the concepts of power and dependency in logistics outsourcing. The paper seeks to answer a central question about how the entrenchment of LSPs occurs and develops in business relationships, if attention were paid to the LSP’s leadership in the relationship and its ability to balance power relations to entrench the shipper’s dependency. To do, authors mobilize a theoretical framework of managerial entrenchment from the organizational finance and the power-dependency at inter-firm level and transpose the entrenchment theory to inter-organizational relationship in logistic. The Managerial interest of this research arises from the importance of modelling the LSPs entrenchment process to help shippers to monitor their growing dependency on LSPs and continuously map their power profile.

This study examines the predictors of the propensity to pay cash dividend including industry structure, natural log of revenue, firm size, big 4 auditors, and financial leverage. The paper draws upon the theory of uncertain binary choice. Pooled unbalanced panel logistic regression and artificial neural network were used to analyze data of 725 firm-year observations obtained from companies’ annual accounts and financial statements from 2012 to 2021. The documented results find that industry structure, natural log of revenue (big 4 auditors, firms’ size and financial leverage) significantly influence the propensity to pay (not to pay) cash dividend. The result on the interaction term shows that industry structure and log revenue has the propensity to significantly predict non-payment of cash dividend. Nagelkerke pseudo R2 indicates that the predictors explain about 36% of variability in payment of cash dividend. The ROC-curves indicate good model fits as areas under the curve are up to .85. We recommend that the management of listed companies and equity stockholders who are interested in dividend payment should consider the history of industry structure and companies’ revenue while those not interested in dividend payment should consider company size, the presence of big 4 auditors and financial leverage. Keywords: Cash dividends, Industry structure, Independent

Financial markets play an essential role in developing modern society and enabling the deployment of economic resources. This study focuses on predicting stock prices using deep learning models. In particular, the daily closing prices of two different stocks from the Casablanca Stock Market Viz Bank of Africa and Itissalat Al-Maghrib (IAM) are considered. The datasets were pre-processed and passed through the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models. The models’ performances were compared based on the performance evaluation metrics, viz: mean squared error (MSE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The paper proposes a novel hybrid model. The hybrid design of the model improves its predictive power as the results of the Hybrid network performance surpassed all the other models.

The present paper focuses on the digital transformation of companies and in particular on the practices of digitalization carried out by SMEs in Morocco. The objective is to study, for these SMEs, the stakes, the perspectives, but also the degree of their commitment to the practice of digitalization strategies. This exploratory research, carried out among Moroccan SMEs from different sectors of activity, has shown that the biggest challenges facing Moroccan companies are the human factor, investments and the lack of reference points for such change.