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This paper aims to explore whether cultural values identified by Hofstede (1980) are relevant with respect to the relationship between career drivers and students’ intentions of pursuing a career in accounting.

A total of 266 Turkish, East African, West African, Iranian and Arabic business-related students studying at Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus have participated in this study. To test the hypotheses, a t-statistic at the univariate level and a discriminant analysis at the multivariate level have been performed.

The results reveal that collectivism and/or large power distance are associated with the statistically significant relationship between parental and peers’ influence and students’ intentions of choosing an accounting career. The results further demonstrate that collectivism and/or strong uncertainty avoidance is/are relevant to insignificant relationship between beliefs factors and students’ career aspirations into accounting profession.

The main implication derived from this study states that the accounting educators and professional accounting firms should mostly target parents and convince them of the positive aspects of accounting study and profession to attract more students from cultures characterized by collectivism and large power distance. Parallel to this, the results suggest that universities and professional accounting firms should use their current students to attract more students into their accounting-related programs.

Given evidence that cost of education is an important issue for the students opting to pursue a career in accounting, educators could attract more students into their accounting programs by providing scholarships to bright students intending to study accounting. They could also increase attractiveness by offering reductions in tuition fees to the students for obtaining good grades in accounting courses.

This study is unique in the sense that it takes a new step to investigate the influence of career-choice factors by using multiple dimensions of cultural values. In addition, this could be the first study exploring the factors that may influence decision of the students studying in North Cyprus in choosing accounting career.

The purpose of the study is to explore how financial leverage influences profitability of 1,503 listed manufacturing firms in China.

The sample of the study is composed of the listed manufacturing firms in China. For the manufacturing firms, the annual financial information from 2008 to 2016 is obtained from the ORBIS database. In this study, initially a simultaneous equation approach is used to control for potential endogeneity. Then, additional regression analyses are conducted with panel data over the period of 2008-2016 using OLS, Fixed-effects, First-difference, Random-effects and Arellano and Bond’s (1991) two-step Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) methods.

The results reveal that the impact of leverage on profitability is inverted U-shaped. In this inverted U-shaped relationship, the positive impact of financial leverage on profitability could be attributed to tax shield, whereas the negative impact might be because of bankruptcy cost, financial distress, severe agency problems and information asymmetry that the listed Chinese firms suffer from because of some institutional characteristics of China.

First, this study focuses on only listed manufacturing firms in China. Second, ownership types are not taken into account in this study.

First, the Chinese government should direct its efforts toward developing the bond markets and promoting alternative privately owned loan creditors to state-owned banks. Parallel to this, the transformation process toward market economy should be accelerated to facilitate the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In addition to this, development of the bond market and privatization of SOEs will also mitigate the agency conflict between creditors and managers and between shareholders and managers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study which investigates the impact of capital structure on profitability of the listed firms in China.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between leverage and firm’s performance in Malaysia by framing the relationship under the tradeoff theory and agency cost theory.

Based on insights drawn from the existing literature, we opted for fixed effects and system two-steps GMM models to establish the hypothesized relationship between leverage and performance. We analyzed 528 nonfinancial firms listed on the Bursa Malaysia Stock exchange for the period of 12 years (2005–2016).

The outcomes show that the leverage ratio improves the firm performance, consistent with leverage serving as an effective strategy in constraining managers from building their personal empire, revealing a proportionately greater benefit for Malaysian firms than the cost to debt financing. The authors also find that a positive relationship between leverage and firm performance switch to the negative when the level of leverage reaches beyond the optimal level. Consequently, switching from positive to negative indicates that debt has a twofold (nonlinear) impact on firm performance.

Our research provides several implications to potential stakeholders. For investors, firms having lower leverage ratios could achieve superior performance, thus investing in corporations pursuing higher performance. Managers should therefore strive for achieving higher performance to meet the needs of investors and shareholders. From the researcher’s perspective, our research suggests the need to go away from the searching linear association between leverage and firm performance and the relevance of nonlinear correlation. Moreover, our research can help managers to understand how their lender relates to their debt to assets ratios. Thus, they can design an optimal level of leverage that not only improves the firm’s performance but also reduce the associated costs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the initial attempt in the context of Malaysia that documents evidence indicating that the lower leverage is likely to create value for shareholders while a higher debt ratio reduces firm profitability.

The purpose of this paper is to show the implementation of customer profitability analysis (CPA) using time‐driven activity‐based costing (TDABC), in a Turkish hotel.

A case study was conducted in a four‐star hotel with 100‐room capacity in the Çukurova region of Turkey. Interviews, direct observations, and documentation collection were used to collect the data.

The results showed that some of the customer segments which were found unprofitable under the conventional ABC method were determined profitable using TDABC. The case study also revealed the cost of idle resources devoted for front office, housekeeping, food preparation, and marketing activities.

Only a single hotel operating in Turkey is examined in this paper. Further research should focus on implementing CPA using TDABC in other hotels in Turkey and abroad.

Based on the results of the study, the hotel management is better able to understand profitability of different customer segments and implement appropriate strategies. Moreover, the time equations of TDABC are considered to provide hotel management with an opportunity to better balance the capacities supplied in departments.

There is limited research relating to profitability analysis in service companies in general and in the hotel industry in particular. Therefore, this paper is unique in the sense that it analyzes the use of TDABC systems for CPA within a real case hotel.

The aim of this study is to explore whether there are statistically significant differences in the influence that various career‐choice factors may have on a decision to choose accounting and non‐accounting majors in Iran. The findings derived from this study could assist accounting educators and professional accounting bodies to understand the reasons why students may want to choose an accounting major. In this regard, the findings could help accounting academics and the policy makers in the accounting sector in Iran and in other similar countries develop appropriate strategies to attract proper students into the accounting programs and to recruit bright accounting graduates into the accounting profession.

At the univariate level, t‐tests of significant differences were performed in order to investigate the similarities and differences between the accounting and non‐accounting students with respect to the importance placed on the career‐choice factors. At the multivariate level, discriminant analysis was conducted in order to find out the important determinants of the choice of an accounting major. Moreover, t‐test and ANOVA statistics were employed in order to explore whether differences in gender, age, and university affect each factor.

The results reveal that the accounting students attach profound importance to financial and job‐market factors and opinions of referents. Intrinsic factors, aptitude for and genuine interest in the subject, perception of the accounting course, and perception of the accounting profession are not found to have significant influence on students’ decision to major in accounting.

This study is unique in that it is the first empirical paper which explores Iranian students’ perceptions of the career‐choice factors in pursuing an accounting major.