The study examines the effect of the social and economic indicators on the stock market performance in Nigeria between 1981 and 2019. The study employs secondary data from the World Bank and Central Bank of Nigeria using the ordinary least squares as the technique of estimation. Findings show that regarding the economic drivers, interest rate, exchange rate, and inflation rate negatively impact the stock market while only income exerts a positive impact. However, both income and interest rate are significant economic drivers of stock performance. Regarding social drivers, life expectancy, poverty, and population exert a positive impact on stock performance. Similarly, both life expectancy and population are significant social drivers of stock market performance in Nigeria. The study recommends that monetary authorities should be cautious in avoiding discretionary policies that might hike the exchange rate; otherwise, the flow of funds to the stock market will be derailed. Also, the fiscal authority should invest massively in safety nets programmes to enhance the capacity of the growing population and reduce poverty.

The erratic performance of the Nigerian economy has generated theoretical and empirical debate in the literature. For instance, while some scholars have posited that inflation and currency depreciation positively influence a country’s economy, others believe the contrary. This leads to the interaction of both the exchange and inflation rates to arrive at an innovative conclusion. Hence, this study examines the effects of both indicators and their interactive effect of the country’s performance in the regulation era between 1986 to 2019, using the autoregressive distributed lag estimation technique. The empirical findings reveal that the interaction of inflation and exchange rate has a negative impact on the economy in the short run, but it is positive in the long run. Thus, the monetary authority should proactively control the foreign exchange rate movement to curtail the recent surge in inflation and boost the performance of the country’s economy.