Using loan data from public firms from 40 countries, we examine the association between lending relationships and loan contract terms. We find significant variation across countries regarding the benefits and costs of banking relationships, which can be explained by the countries’ differential legal and regulatory environments. In countries with weak disclosure regulations and institutions, borrowers pay significantly higher interest rates on relationship loans. However, as countries’ disclosure regulations improve, the gap in the interest cost between relationship and transactional loans is reduced. In further corroboration of this effect, we document an improvement in the relative costs of relationship lending following a country's IFRS adoption.

On Mar. 21, 2007, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) passed Exchange Act Rule 12h-6 to make it easier for cross-listed firms to deregister from the U.S. market and escape its regulatory costs. Using difference-in-difference (DD) tests, we find that, on average, Rule 12h-6’s passage induced an increase in voting premium, a decline in equity raising, and a decline in cross-listing premium. These effects are observed for exchange-listed firms and for firms from countries with weak investor protection. We conclude that although cross-listed firms are still valued at a significant premium over non-cross-listed firms, the rule decreased the value of commitment to the U.S. regulatory system.

This paper investigates the long-term impacts of China’s nationwide public health campaigns targeting malaria, measles, and meningitis between the 1960s and 1980s. Exploiting regional variation in precampaign disease prevalence across birth cohorts, we show that these interventions generated sizable improvements in education, cognition, health, and income. As an illustrative case, individuals from high-malaria regions who were fully exposed to the eradication campaign attained about 0.5 additional years of schooling and earned over 10% higher income in adulthood, with cognitive and schooling gains explaining a substantial share of the income effects. Extending the same approach to measles and meningitis vaccination campaigns reveals comparably large benefits, with internal rates of return ranging from 21% to 34%. Together, these findings highlight the lasting socioeconomic returns to early-life health interventions and underscore the role of public health as a foundation for human capital accumulation and long-run economic growth.