This article undertakes an empirical investigation on how firm board characteristics relate with corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) in the banking industry of developing economies with a particular interest in Nigeria. The study focuses on a sample of 11 out of the 13 Nigerian listed national commercial banks which provide similar services and are subject to the same regulations and disclosure requirements by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) from 2007 to 2018. Multiple regression analysis was employed on panel data obtained from the banks’ audited financial statements. The findings show that board with large number of persons, low proportion of persons operating outside the bank operations, and higher percentage of feminine directors on the board support higher level of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The results of large number of persons on board and better proportion of feminine administrators support the resource dependency theory and agency theory which offer the broad theoretical underpinnings for this study. The low percentage of nonexecutive administrators negates stand of bank regulators. This implies that banks with an oversized board size, gender diversity, and less board independence are seemingly favorably disposed to improve on CSR.

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the impact of debt structure on the performance of Nigerian quoted firms. It was conducted using 12-year annualized panel data spanning the period 2001-2012 for cross section of 43 firms from different sectorial classifications. The data were collated from the annual reports of the sampled firms and Nigeria Stock Exchange factbooks. The study employed three regression estimations (Pooled OLS, Fixed Effects and Random Effects) as a result of unobserved heterogeneity in the dataset. The outcome from the regression estimations showed that debt structure has negative and significant impact on the performance of Nigerian quoted firms within the period under review. The study concludes that debt structure contribute negatively to performance of Nigerian quoted firms, thereby agree with pecking order theory.

This study examines the influence of working capital cycles on financial performance of cement industry of Nigeria with a sample of all the listed cement companies in the Nigerian Stock Exchange for the period 2007 to 2018. Correlation and regression analysis were used tools of analysis. Financial performance was proxy by return on assets and return on equity. The study show that a shorter inventory conversion period, account payable period and a longer account collection period enhances the return on asset while a shorter inventory conversion, account collection and account payable periods enhances the return on equity.

In this study, we investigate the effect of official development assistance and income per capita on health outcomes in developing countries. Health outcome is proxied by life expectancy and under-5-mortality rate. We accounted for the endogeneity problem in the model by employing a dynamic two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator. We find that official development assistance does not improve health outcome in developing countries, while income per capital significantly improves health outcome in developing countries. The study reports that CO2 emission is not a significant determinant of health outcome in developing countries but the prevalence of HIV and Immunization significantly determines health outcomes in developing countries. More specifically the prevalence of HIV increases the under-5-mortality rate and decreases life expectancy; immunization increases life expectancy but decreases under-5-mortality rate. It was equally revealed in the study that health outcome in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) does not significantly differ from health outcomes in other developing countries. We equally reported that the effect of income per capita on health outcome in Sub-Saharan Africa countries is not significantly different from that of non-SSA countries. The effect of official development assistant on health outcome in SSA was ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ugwegbe Sebastine Ugochukwu is a Lecturer in Caritas University Enugu, Nigeria. His research interest is International Finance and Economic Development. The focus of this paper is to provide insight on the determinants of health outcome in developing countries.

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