IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/eabhps/2004.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Reinventing institutions: Trust offices and the Dutch financial system, 1690s-2000s

Author

Listed:
  • de Jong, Abe
  • Jonker, Joost
  • Röell, Ailsa
  • Westerhuis, Gerarda

Abstract

Trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very different purposes. We argue that trust offices have been reinvented several times to adapt to changing circumstances. Originally set up for administrative convenience, they helped to create liquidity, notably for foreign securities. As from the 1930s, their most prominent purpose became to shield directors of large corporation from shareholder influence and hostile takeover threats. This is still their most common function in their current reincarnation as dedicated foundations, each tied to a particular company and largely controlled by its board and executives.

Suggested Citation

  • de Jong, Abe & Jonker, Joost & Röell, Ailsa & Westerhuis, Gerarda, 2020. "Reinventing institutions: Trust offices and the Dutch financial system, 1690s-2000s," eabh Papers 20-04, The European Association for Banking and Financial History (EABH).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:eabhps:2004
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/226211/1/1739037693.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    trust offices; corporate governance; financial innovation; the Netherlands;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • N23 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • N24 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - Europe: 1913-

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:eabhps:2004. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eabhhea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.