In order to survive and compete in the current world, a business needs to identify the needs of its potential customers and to develop products or services that can meet customers’ needs. This is true for the educational business as well, which is essentially a service business with students as its clients. Given the growing competition between universities for recruiting international students, it becomes increasingly important for the university management to gain a better understanding of the factors that may influence student’s decisions on selecting universities. This is especially necessary for Higher Education (HE) institutions in Taiwan where the number of international students has almost doubled over the past four years, studying a wide variety of majors.This study applied conjoint analysis to analyze the factors which could influence international students' decisions on selecting universities to study at Taiwan. We found that the strongest influencing factor is “scholarship”, followed by the factors of “desired course”, “language”, and “international environment” (these three factors have the same rank), then followed by “future job”, and finally the weakest influencing factor is “institutional image”.

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) will discuss whether or not accounting rules for M&A change, and it plans to draw a conclusion in 2021. In view of this fact, it is considered that a series of large M&A have significant effects on corporate earnings worldwide. This paper examines whether the amortization and/or non-amortization of goodwill affect companies’ earnings and future cash flow, an analysis for which there are two reasons. First, IFRS initiates the debate on the premise of goodwill amortization. If goodwill is amortized, it will have a profound impact on corporate profits and cash flow. Second, M&A has recently increased in Japan due to the increase in retained earnings and because IFRS has not requested goodwill amortization. The conclusion is as follows: First, it has become clear that legally retained earnings accelerate M&A because they affect the future goodwill along with both accounting standards. Next, the results revealed that the amortization of goodwill corresponds with the future ROA in conformity with Japanese accounting standards. On the other hand, this study did not determine that goodwill affects ROA in IFRS companies. Particularly, IFRS firms invested greater amounts of money than did Japanese accounting firms. Therefore, IFRS firms' goodwill might not be effective applied to M&A within four years.

This study scrutinised whether the profitability indexes of firms and the costs associated with product creation as reflections of growth potential affect the percentage of shareholding that Japanese banks acquire from Japanese client companies. To this end, multiple regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 302 firms on which 2,231 observations were made over the fiscal years 2006 to 2015. The findings indicated that the principle of shareholding alone does not drive banks to secure shares in client companies. Instead, the standard that prompts share acquisition is whether management is efficiently operating company business. The implication of this study is that a bank’s shareholding strategy requires client companies to implement management with an awareness of corporate governance, whose significance lies in advancing the realisation of returns from corporate activities by lenders and/or shareholders. In other words, banks are motivated to hold shares when client companies are highly profitable and efficient. Even under these conditions, a bank carries on serving as the financial institution with which a client company is primarily affiliated. As a main bank, a given financial institution seems to consider the pursuit of long-term corporate profits through the research and development of a client firm. However, whether banks will continue to seek such profits from client companies is doubtful.

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This study investigates how insiders and outsiders affect the earnings management of CEOs by conducting a comparative analysis of insiders, trust banks, outsiders, and global investors. Interestingly, the holding shares of insiders and outsiders have opposite effects on CEOs’ opportunistic accounting behaviours.