SECTION 1 - INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the study
Listed companies use financial statements as one of the major medium of communication with their stakeholders. Therefore, stock market regulators and accounting standards setters trying to improve the quality of financial statements in order to increase the transparency level in financial reporting. (Vishnani S., Shah B.K., 2008). Financial reporting by companies is effected via the preparation and publication of financial statements. These financial statements are required to exhibit certain degree of quality in terms of their information contents. Mines & Wahlen (2006) and Belkaoui (2002) opined that accounting information contained in the financial reports should possess certain qualities as relevance, verifiability, understandability, neutrality, timeliness, comparability, and completeness. When the financial reports disclose quality accounting information, according to Benston (2007), the decision of the users (investors, management, government, employees, creditors, analysts) of the reports could as well be qualitative and informed.

While there have been a number of studies on this topic in developed countries (Collins, Maydew and Weiss, 1997; Lev and Zarowin, 1999; Francis and Schipper, 1999; Beisland, Hamberg and Navak, 2010), one is not aware of any expansive study that has explored the subject of value relevance of accounting information in Nigeria. It has not been comprehensively researched primarily because of problems with data availability (Negah 2008). Literature on capital research in accounting in Nigeria is so scanty and insufficient that it is difficult to determine value relevance of accounting information in this country. In Nigeria, fairly related literatures are on accounting systems (Jagetia and Nwadike, 1983). The above mentioned studies provide no significant validity