As a source of credit on residential real estate in North America, private individuals played a vital role well into the 1950s, especially in Canada. Rare national surveys, together with varied case studies in Canada and the United States, indicate that they provided land contracts, construction loans, and first and junior mortgages to a variety of people, including family and friends and many strangers. Contacts were arranged through social networks, agents, and brokers. By comparison with major lending institutions, their role and significance have been overlooked, their loans often unrecorded. In the early decades, lenders included men and women in a range of occupations, not least because many owners offered credit to buyers to facilitate sales. By the 1950s, women, professionals, and businessmen were the main investors, the chief beneficiaries being lower-income households in less desirable districts. Some personal lenders were ill-informed or exploitive, but most enabled families to realize their aspirations to own. This sector’s decline was a consequence of federal policies that promoted national mortgage markets, making the business more professional but displacing practices that had enabled many home buyers and builders.

This article traces the history of the life sciences business in the Cambridge–Boston area and explores how it became the global epicenter of the modern therapeutics industry. While business history scholarship on therapeutics is extensive, few have studied recent technological modalities—from therapeutic proteins to cell and gene therapies—or adopted a regional ecosystem perspective. Based on archival materials and oral histories, this research bridges these works and incorporates insights from the innovation ecosystems framework. It considers how dynamic interactions between an evolving network of complementary and interdependent actors, including therapeutics firms, universities, hospitals, and risk capital providers, enhanced innovative capacity. This perspective also illuminates how ecosystem strength derived from the co-evolution of actors—from universities restructuring technology transfer offices to academic scientists becoming entrepreneurs. The research further highlights the nonlinearity of innovation processes. It shows how an extraordinary interplay between structural advantage, serendipitous timing, and strategic actions cultivated an unparalleled capacity to translate emergent technologies into novel therapies.

The purpose of dividends is to distribute income to shareholders. Many stock market investors have only a few shares in their portfolios. For these investors, selling one share to generate income is not an attractive alternative to receiving dividends. We describe the dividend decision process in Sweden and provide detailed analysis of how Swedish listed companies manage dividends around new issuance of shares and stock dividends. We also examine how companies facilitate financial planning for shareholders by separating special and regular dividends, decomposing annual dividends into interest and profit, and smoothing dividends relative to earnings.