Managing agency business groups, elite directors, and the rubber boom, 1897–1913
研究了一种新的组织形式——管理代理商业集团，分析了在1914年前橡胶繁荣中，代理行如何通过连锁董事构建集团，利用商业和种植园专长获取伦敦和本地资本市场融资，并指出董事会构成信号了新股质量。
Abstract We identify a new organizational form, the Managing Agency Business Group (MABG), demonstrating how agency houses used interlocking directorships to build groups on the basis of commercial and plantation expertise to access finance on London stock markets and local capital markets in the pre‐1914 rubber boom. MABG boards combined managerial and commercial expertise with access to financial resources. Such features, rather than membership of elite groups, effectively signalled new issue quality and explained the composition of board membership in the rubber industry, which represented a substantial proportion of initial public offerings in the decade before the First World War. The MABGs used a serial finance model, through which influential intermediaries embedded in commercial networks created managerial capacity in individual estates, which were then merged with other estates, floated on the stock market, consolidated into groups, and their returns securitized through the creation of investment trusts.