【正文】 ent allocation of resources and negatively impact economic growth. Prior research points to the role of financial institutions in economizing on information costs by noting the positive relation between financial development and economic growth. While important, these studies do not directly address the role of a country’s information environment on the efficient allocation of resources, and financial development per se does not necessarily eliminate information frictions in a country (Rajan and Zingales [1998]). Our study fills this void by examining the role of corporate transparency over and above the effects of a country’s economic and financial development. In addition to reducing information acquisition costs, greater corporate transparency ameliorates problems created by information frictions in several ways. First, transparency improves firms’ access to lower cost external financing. In the absence of transparency, higher cost external financing will impede firms’ ability to take advantage of growth opportunities. Second, transparency contributes to more informative stock prices. Informed stock prices reflect greater firmspecific information and this ensures that prices remain close to their fundame ntal value and reflect available growth opportunities. 6 Third, transparency plays an important governance role in that it allows greater monitoring by outside investors. This greater monitoring in turn ensures that managers take advantage of value enhancing growth opportunities and prevents diversion of firms’ resources. Taken together, these arguments suggest a firstorder role of corporate transparency in facilitating investment efficiency. At the macro level, the implication is that transparency will contribute to the efficient allocation of scarce resources. We empirically evaluate this proposition by examining industry growth rate ovement between country pairs. Following Fisman and Love [2020], we calculate the ovement in industry growth rates for 37 industries in the manufacturing sector across 37 countries (666 unique country pairs). Assuming that growth shocks are correlated across countries, we predict the ovement in industry growth rates will be higher between pairs of countries that exhibit a high level of corporate transparency. In contrast, industries in low transparency countries may not be able to fully exploit these global growth opportunities due to information frictions and hence may not realize higher growth rates. We find robust evidence consistent with this prediction after controlling for an 982 J. R. Francis S. Huang, I. K. Khurana, AND R. pereira extensive set of countrylevel institutions and variables. In a supplemental analysis, we also document that countries with high transparency have a stronger association between ex ante growth opportunities and realized ex post growth in real GDP per capita and that growth opportunities were converted more into real growth when analyst coverage increased over time. Overall, the evidence points to a firstorder importance of corporate transparency (including the quality of accounting information) in the efficient allocation of resources and economic growth. However, as noted before, we cannot rule out the possibility that the associations we document are the result of other countrylevel factors that affect both FD and the information environment。 for this reason, our results may not demonstrate direct causality. Understanding factors that influence efficient resource allocation is important because of the growing decentralization of investment decisions around the world. Specifically, the increasing trend toward privatization has meant that investments 7 undertaken by the private sector will dwarf stateowned enterprise investments. Further, there is greater capital mobilization and an increasing distance between the suppliers of capital and the managers of this capital. In contrast to prior research, which has emphasized the importance of the