Efficient Transactors or Rent-Seeking Monopolists? The Rationale for Early Chartered Trading Companies
探讨16至17世纪特许贸易公司（如东印度公司）的理性基础，分析其是高效交易者还是寻租垄断者，对理解早期跨国企业起源有价值。
Abstract Although the modern multinational corporation is usually regarded as a product of changes in the scale and nature of business that have occurred since the middle of the nineteenth century, there are examples of large, integrated firms dating back to the sixteenth century. Perhaps the most celebrated of these are the English and Dutch East India companies, established in 1600 and 1602, respectively, with a national monopoly of trade with Asia. Other English companies to be granted trading monopoly charters included the Muscovy Company (1553), the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670), and the Royal African Company (1672), and similar rights were granted to foreign companies by the governments of France, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark.