Mission, values, vision and objectives are considered essential in strategic planning and management activities of any organization, in that they function together to determine its strategic direction. The objective of this study is to identify, classify and analyse core value statements of financial institutions quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. Based on simple random sampling and in line with the Godden (2004)’s sample size formula, a sample of 38 was selected out of a population of 52 financial institutions. The selected financial institutions have 209 core value statements, which were classified into seven value dimensions: commitment to customers, commitment to stakeholders, commitment to employees, commitment to diversity, commitment to integrity, entrepreneurship, and corporate social responsibility. Using both content and descriptive analyses, the study found that commitment to integrity (33.97%) and commitment to customers (23.92%) are two most popular out of the seven value dimensions. However, commitment to employees constitutes as low as 1.44% of the value dimensions. It is therefore recommended that financial institutions in Nigeria should increase their commitment to employees and practically institutionalize and integrate their core values in the heart of the employees rather than making it a mere statement in black and white

It is expected that local government as the closest tier of government to the people should promote grassroots development while at the same time contributeto national economicgrowth and development. The extent to which this is realized particularly in a developing country like Nigeria has not been given the empirical attention it deserves in past studies. Therefore, in this study, we examined the effect of local government finances (comprising total revenue, capital and recurrent expenditure) on economic growth in Nigeria for the period, 1993 to 2021. Dynamic Least Squares, Fully Modified Least Squares, Canonical Cointegrating Regression, andGranger causality techniqueswere applied to the annual time series data sourced from Central Bank of Nigeria’s statistical bulletin. Empirical findings of this study confirmthe existence of a long-run relationship between local government finances and economic growth in Nigeria. Furthermore, local governments’ recurrent and capital expenditureswere found to have positive but non-significant effect on economic growthunlike local governments’ total revenue which has negative and non-significant effect on economic growthof Nigeria. This study found nocausal relationship between local government finances and economic growth.However, there isa unidirectional causality runningfrom revenue to recurrent expenditure at the local government level. Likewise, capital expenditure has a unidirectional causality with recurrent expenditure. It can therefore be concluded that local government finances have no significant effect on economic growth ofNigeriain the study period. This study recommends that local government finances should be re-engineered towards growth-inducing projects, programmes and investments.

The objective of this study was to examine the implications of financial inclusion on capital market liquidity in Nigeria. Therefore, we applied Vector Autoregression (VAR) technique to the analysis of the quarterly time series data obtained from Central Bank of Nigeria’s statistical bulletin and World Development Indicators for the period, 2008Q1 to 2018Q4. Findings of this study reveal that deposit penetration, bank penetration and credit penetration have positive but non-significant impact on stock market turnover ratio in Nigeria. Furthermore, unlike deposit penetration which exerts negative and non-significant influence on the value of shares traded ratio; bank penetration and credit penetration have positive but non-significant impact on the value of shares traded ratio in Nigeria. The study posits that financial inclusion exerts no significant influence/implications on stock market liquidity in Nigeria with a very negligible variation in the latter (stock market liquidity) explained by the former (financial inclusion). It is therefore recommended that accounts and bank penetrations should be re-engineered towards their translations to high volume and value of capital market transactions rather than mere financial penetration without any capital market implications in Nigeria.