We exploit the features of the Italian equity market characterized by high ownership concentration across all types of companies (La Porta, Loper-de-Silanes, & Shleifer,1999) to disentangle the effects of family ownership from other major block holders on the quality of accounting information. We analyze a panel of 778 firm tear observation (507 family firm-tear observations and 271 nonfamily firm-year observations ) on firms listed on the Italian Stock Exchange from 1998 to 2004. Our results show that family firms exhibit on average higher accounting quality compared to nonfamily firms. More over,we show that the determinants of accounting quality across family and nonfamily firms systematically differ along several dimensions.