Industry,market structure,and the informational content of financial statements

What distinguishes the competitive from the noncompetitive structure is the unequal and costly access to relevant information. Because of the characteristics of accounting information, we have put forward the hypothesis that the publication of the financial statements of firms belonging to competitive industries provides less information than the publication of financial statements of firms belonging to oligopolistic industries. The results of this research based on variance analysis fully support this hypothesis. According to our results, the informational content of financial statements is positively affected by the level of concentration in the particular industry.