Interlocking Directorates of Banks and Industrial Companies in Hungary at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
The article uses new archival research on the Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest and industrial companies to examine the validity of existing interpretations of interlocking directorates in Hungarian bank-industry relations at the beginning of the twentieth century. The results show that interlocking hardly depended on capital relations, which suggests that board membership had not only a control or monitoring function. The lack of regular capital relations made bank hegemony, or even a significant bank influence, not concomitant with interlocking. The Hungarian Commercial Bank was not always able to represent its own interests effectively, not even in those cases when beside the interlocks the bank was a significant owner or creditor of industrial companies. The article concludes that a more complex interpretation of interlocking directorships in Hungary is essential.
Universal banking networks in pre-war Germany: new evidence from company financial data
Explanations for the extensive interlocking of bank and firm directorates in pre-World War I Germany have traditionally emphasized oversight and control by universal banks over their industrial clientele. The economic logic inherent in the orthodox view suggests that bank-affiliated companies should benefit from improvements in information flows as well as the good advice and guidance of bankers. Thus, attached firms would be expected to have maintained higher debt–equity ratios, profitability, and growth rates than did their independent counterparts. Using a new database of firm-level financial data to estimate discrete-choice models of the bank affiliation decision, this paper provides evidence that contradicts the standard view. The paper instead argues that externalities in the provision of underwriting and brokerage services motivated the expansive networks of interlocking directorates. The results also provide provisional evidence that proxy votes conferred on universal banks by their commercial customers played a significant role in the development of financial–industrial networks. Finally, the paper shows that, while loose connections between banks and firms were widespread, direct, exclusive relationships were rare. The findings argue for a moderate interpretation of the benefits of interlocking directorates in the later stages of German industrialization.
The uprising of the marginalised: a socio-economic perspective of the Syrian uprising
More than three years after the outbreak of protests in a number of Arab countries, the role of socio-economic factors in these events is attracting more attention. One of the cases that needs more research is Syria. More than three years into the Syrian uprising, the socio-economic roots of the protest movement that became one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the history of the Middle East need to be examined. While it has been observed that the Syrian uprising, contrary to some ‘Arab Spring’ countries, has been an uprising of more marginalised social groups with a strong role played by poorer segments in the society, particularly rural and rural-to-urban migrants, the socio-economic explanation for this is still underdeveloped. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of this issue by examining the political and socio-economic compromise that underlined the rule of the Ba’th party in Syria for four decades and unpacking how a combination of internal and external shifts that started in the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s led to the erosion of this compromise, providing the background to the events that began in 2011.