Affidavit of the administrators of the estate of Hannah Lee, 17 January 1788

Handwritten affidavit declaring Isaac Story of Marblehead, Mass. the executor of the estate of Hannah Lee, with the estate's proceeds to be distributed to Thomas and Sarah Fayerweather, Thomas Hubbard Townsend of Needham, and Andrew and Mary Bordman of Tewksbury. The affidavit also appoints London merchants to recover lands in England.

Real estate list, fragment, undated

Small handwritten note listing four properties: farms in Amherst and Partridgefield, land in Rutland, and two lots in Otisfield.

Account book of the executors of the Henry Flynt estate, 1760-1767

The volume contains acknowledgements of the disbursements of Harvard Tutor Henry Flynt's estate written in the hands of the respective beneficiaries. The entries begin on February 27, 1760 following Flynt's death on February 13, 1760, and continue through May 9, 1767. Each receipt includes the date, name of the executors, description of the property, beneficiary's name, and signature. The beneficiaries include the wife of Sol. Davy, Dorothy Jackson, Edmund Quincy, J. Henry Quincy, Esther and Stephen Richard (received by attorney Nicholas Boylston), Dorothy Skinner (also received for her by her husband Richard Skinner), John Wendell, Edmund Wendell, Katherine Wendell, and Oliver Wendell, as well as Harvard College (received by Harvard Treasurer Thomas Hubbard), and the Deacons of the First Church of Cambridge. The volume also includes a loose document titled "Account from Messrs Edmund & Josiah Quincy Settled & Ballanced March 31, 1749."

Fashions and fads in finance: contingent emulation and the political economy of sovereign wealth fund creation. IHS Political Science Series No. 131, July 2012

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), government-owned or managed investment vehicles, have proliferated at a remarkable rate over the past decade, even as political controversy has surrounded them. Why? The extant literature depicts the process of SWF creation as driven by functional imperatives associated with “excess” revenue and reserves accumulated from commodity booms and large current account surpluses. I argue that SWF creation also reflects in large part a process of contingent emulation in which first this policy has been constructed as appropriate for countries with given characteristics, and then when countries took on these characteristics, they followed their peers. Put simply, fashions and fads in finance matter for policy diffusion. I assess this argument using a new dataset on SWF creation that covers nearly 80 countries from 1984 to 2007. The results suggest peer-based contingent emulation has been a crucial factor shaping the decision of many countries to create a SWF, especially among fuel exporters. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2 – 5 September 2010. The author would like to thank Eric Neumayer for his many suggestions and comments on previous versions of the manuscript. The author would also like to thank Zachary Elkins for sharing data. Finally, the author would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Natali Bulamacioglu and Christopher Gandrud.

Supporting Access to Finance by SMEs: Mapping the initiatives in five EU countries. ECMI Research Report No. 9, April 2014

This paper maps the initiatives to support access to finance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that were available at national level in 2012 in the five biggest European economies (Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain). This mapping distinguishes initiatives promoted and financed primarily through public resources from those developed independently by the market. A second breakdown is proposed for those sources of finance with different targets, i.e. whether the target is debt financing (typically bank loans at favourable conditions, public guarantees on loans, etc.) or equity financing (typically venture capital funds, tax incentives on equity investments, etc.). A broad set of initiatives has been implemented to close the funding gap of SMEs in these five countries. The total amount of public spending for SMEs, however, has remained well below 1% of GDP. Public subsidisation of bank loans has been by far the most diffused type of intervention. Despite the fact that this strategy might prove to be effective in the short term, it fails to address long-term sustainability issues via a more diversified set of financing tools.