Purpose This study aims to examine the effects of board independence and gender diversity on bank performance in Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach The two-step system-generalized method moment was used to estimate the effect of board independence and gender diversity on bank performance in Nigeria using annual data of 15 deposit money banks from 2006 to 2018. Findings The results revealed that gender diversity is a significant positive predictor of bank performance, whereas board independence is a negative predictor of bank performance in Nigeria. Practical implications Despite the significant positive relationship between gender diversity and bank performance, this paper does not recommend mandatory quota-based initiates of female representation on corporate boards because of the increasing number of female representations on corporate boards of banks in Nigeria. Originality/value The study contributes to corporate governance literature from developing country perspective and policy, particularly, on the relevance or otherwise of market-based measures in assessing bank performance in developing counties. This paper finds that market-based variables are not good measures of firm performance in economies with underdeveloped markets.

This study investigates the potential impact of climate change and armed conflict on inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The system-GMM for a panel of 35 SSA countries is employed using annual data from 1997 to 2018. The empirical results indicate that armed conflict and climate are major drivers of inequality in SSA. The direct impact of the two determinants is more than the indirect impact. Also, the impact of armed conflict is more than the climate change. The coefficients of population growth, output growth, unemployment, natural rent, exchange rate and inflation rate are significant positive predictors of inequality in the SSA. The study advocates for a multidisciplinary inclusive growth strategy that prioritises the climate change reversal, de-escalation of armed conflict, population control, reduction of the unemployment rate and increasing informal sector productivity, to promote inclusive growth and reduce inequality. However, sequencing the policy targets relative to the magnitude of their impact on inequality is extremely crucial.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the effect of financial technology on cash holding in Nigeria.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use Pesaran et al.’s (2001) autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test approach to cointegration to estimate the long-run relationship between four direct measures of financial technology (automated teller machine [ATM], Internet banking [IB], point of sale [POS] and mobile banking [MB]) and cash holding.FindingsThe authors find the presence of long-run negative relationship between cash holding and the four direct measures of financial technology.Practical implicationsDespite the negative effect of financial technology on cash holding, the descriptive results highlight increasing trajectory in cash holding. This suggests that structural factors such as ethical climate, literacy level, household characteristics, currency denomination structures, economic uncertainty and infrastructure deficit may account for the pervasive cash transactions in Nigeria and not necessarily the unwillingness of economic agents to use digital platform for financial transactions.Originality/valueThis study contributes to existing literature by augmenting the money demand function to accommodate direct measures of financial technology in examining the effectiveness of the policy on cash holding in Nigeria.

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Studies that explore the relationship between financial innovation and the stability of money demand in Africa use the indirect measure of financial innovation. Previous studies on Nigeria also ignored total monetary aggregates (M3), despite its importance to monetary policy formulation and liquidity management. This paper contributes to the existing literature in two ways; first, we expand the generic money demand function to include the direct measure of financial innovation. Second, we test the model on Nigeria using a broader definition of money demand-narrow money (M1), broad money (M2) and total monetary aggregates (M3). We employ the Pesaran et al. (2001) autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test approach to cointegration in estimating the respective equations and find evidence of a long-run relationship between money demand and financial innovation. The CUSUM and CUSUM-of-Squares tests reveal stable money demand across the three measures of money demand, which indicates that the inclusion of financial innovation has not altered the long-run stability of money demand in Nigeria.