When the government holds the authority to revise and enact corporate accounting regulations, changes in accounting standards signify not only changes in the accounting system but can also serve as a means of conveying the symbolic meaning of policies that the government intends to implement through changes in accounting regulation. This study examined and compared the information effects of these two aspects embedded in the mandatory disclosure of consolidated financial statements. First, the information effects of the mandatory disclosure of consolidated financial statements were compared between parent companies required to disclose consolidated financial statements and firms without such obligations, in order to examine the impact of mandatory consolidated financial statement disclosure on parent companies. Next, the information effects were compared between affiliates of large business groups and other firms to examine whether the mandatory disclosure of consolidated financial statements was perceived as carrying the symbolic meaning of government regulation over large business groups. The results are as follows. First, there was no difference in the information effects of mandatory consolidated financial statement disclosure between firms subject to consolidation and those not subject to it, or between parent companies that had previously disclosed consolidated financial statements and those that had not. This implies that no disclosure expansion effect existed. Second, except in the case of firms subject to consolidation, for the full sample and for firms not subject to consolidation, the mandatory disclosure of consolidated financial statements did show a difference in information effects between group affiliates and non-affiliates. This demonstrates that the symbolic meaning effect of government regulation exists, albeit in a limited manner.