Usefulness of financial statement information

This work is analysing association between stock returns and financial statement information. It studies the usefulness of accounting data for investors and its development in time. In the beginning it summarizes main features of this relationship and derives hypothesis of weakening temporal association. In the analytical part two models for assessment of this phenomenon are introduced and based on various financial indicators available from annual reports it tests this hypothesis year by year. The evidence suggests that the usefulness of financial statement information is not deteriorating over examined period. Nonetheless, the association is very weak despite both increasing investor demand for relevant information and persistent regulator efforts to improve the quality and timeliness of financial information.