Recent studies stress the importance of service industries on a country's economic growth performance. Amid a decreasing labor force due to population aging, productivity growth of industries, especially service industries, is a focus of economic policy in Japan. Recently, the Service Productivity and Innovation for Growth (SPRING) a business-government-academia forum and the Service Engineering Research Center were established to enhance service sector innovation and productivity. However, analysis of productivity in service industries using microdata lags far behind that of the manufacturing industry, for which solid and reliable data are available.
The paper attempts to determine whether there are significant gender differences in academic performance among undergraduate students at Middle East Technical University (METU), which is a large public university in Turkey, and if so, the factors that give rise to these differences. Academic performance is affected by a host of factors. These include individual and household characteristics such as student ability, motivation, the quality of secondary education obtained and the like.
The gender of the student may also be a factor in determining student performance. Childhood training and experience, gender differences in attitudes, parental and teacher expectations and behaviors, differential course taking and biological differences between the sexes may all be instrumental in giving rise to gender differences in achievement (Feingold, 1988). The rather high gender disparity in various spheres of public life and the patriarchal social structure in Turkey may also lead to poorer academic performance among female university students.
This study explores the relationship between competition in product markets and managerial incentives to distort earnings. A large amount of voluminous literature in economics provides theoretical guidance on how market competition can mitigate agency problems (Hart, 1983; Meyer and Vickers, 1995; Schmidt, 1997) or sometimes exacerbate agency problems (Schfarstein, 1988; Martin, 1993; Horn, Lang and Lundgren, 1994). Empirical researchers have relied on some of these theoretical predictions to motivate their analyses on the effects of competition on managerial effort and thereby a firm’s productivity and operating efficiency (Nickell, 1996; Graham, Kaplan and Sibley, 1983). Given that the demand for financial reporting arises from agency conflicts between outside stakeholders and insiders (Healy and Palepu, 2001), the impact of competition on agency problems (even though an ambiguous one) leads us to motivate and predict some relationship between competition in product markets and financial reporting practices.
Because agency problems can distort financial reporting, this study examines those aspects of financial reporting that may be induced by managerial incentives to distort true economic performance by managing reported income. We therefore rely on three earnings management measures as proposed in Leuz, Nanda and Wysocki (2003) which have been motivated in their study from managerial inclination to distort economic performance with a motive to concealing or extracting private benefits. These measures encompass both earnings smoothing in excess of what may be considered “normal” and earnings discretion i.e. managerial tendency to overstate reported earnings or achieve certain earnings targets.
