Over the last decade many developing countries strengthened their transparency standards with the objective of improving asset market allocations and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper develops a general equilibrium model and argues that in a financially underdeveloped economy - with uninsurable consumption risk and stochastic-investment - enforcing financial transparency might be counterproductive. The framework builds upon a standard property that illiquid asset markets cause under-investment in assets that pay in the long-run, because individually rational agents hoard cash to exploit sales of underpriced long-term assets. First, I show that in this environment private revelation of news about investment-returns could give a chance to sell low-quality assets and then characterize the conditions under which the lack of financial transparency reduces under-investment and improves macroeconomic development. An empirical analysis reveals that the theoretical predictions of the model is in line with cross-country data.

This paper investigates the empirical relationship between financial structure and employee compensation in the banking industry. Using an international panel of banks, we show that well-capitalized banks pay higher wages to their employees. Our results are robust to changes in measurement, model specification and estimation methods. In order to account for the positive association between bank capital and employee compensation, we illustrate a stylized 3-period model and show that well-capitalized banks have incentives to pay higher wages to induce monitoring. Such monitoring rents of employees at capitalized banks are expected to be higher in societies with weak institutions. Further empirical analysis shows that the weaker is institutional quality of a country the stronger is the positive relationship between bank capital and wages - supporting our theoretical conjectures.