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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, quality of life and the labour market outcome across North and Southern Nigeria.

Data was obtained from staff laid off in selected tertiary institutions in North East and South West Nigeria using a self-administered questionnaire with a total sample size of 185. Findings are shown using the heteroscedastic linear regression and descriptive statistics.

The results showed a significant negative effect of unemployment during the pandemic on mental health and quality of life. Less than half of those laid off are reabsorbed into the labour market with the majority in the South than the Northern region and most are in self-employment.

The coronavirus pandemic negatively affected the human race, with a huge socio-economic impact linked to health and well-being. This reality calls for attention to the role it played on mental health and the quality of life as well as how it has influenced the labour market. Labour empowerment during a pandemic is key to cushion the effect of pandemics on health and the labour market. This can be in the form of skill empowerment and increased access to funds for business start-ups to enable self-employment that typifies the labour market after a pandemic. This in turn will reduce mental health challenges and low quality of life associated with pandemics.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first in the literature that provides empirical evidence of the effect of unemployment during the pandemic on well-being captured using mental health and the quality of life in Nigeria. Findings on labour market outcomes due to the pandemic and across regions in Nigeria are also scarce in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interactive relationships between oil price shocks and the Nigeria stock market.

The paper applied the multivariate vector auto‐regression that employed the generalized impulse response function and the forecast variance decomposition error.

Empirical evidence reveals that stock market returns exhibit insignificant positive response to oil price shocks but reverts to negative effects after a period of time depending on the nature of the oil price shocks. The results are similar even with the inclusion of other variables. Also, the asymmetric effect of oil price shocks on the Nigerian stock returns indices is not supported by statistical evidences.

This is the first study to examine the dynamic linkages between stock market behaviour and oil price shocks in Nigeria.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of interactive effect of competition and corporate governance on productivity growth of firms in Nigeria. Studies that have considered this issue were mainly from developed countries possessing strong institutions as against those of developing countries like Nigeria. Moreover, studies from Nigeria have focused exclusively on corporate governance and firm performance. The interaction effect of competition on corporate governance is yet to be addressed in the context of Nigeria.

The study adopts the dynamic panel data analysis approach suggested by Arellano and Bond for productivity growth analysis. Data on 76 non-financial firms for 11 years beginning from 1997 were extracted from the financial statements of companies collected from the Nigerian Stock Exchange and subsequently analysed using General Methods of Moments (GMM).

The results show that competition had a positive impact on productivity growth, however, its interaction effect with corporate governance had a substitute but not significant impact on productivity growth. When competition was interacted with an alternative corporate governance mechanism – bank – a positive and significant impact was, however, observed which shows that competition and bank loans are complementary in stimulating productivity growth of firms in Nigeria.

The study could not be carried out beyond year 2007 owing to the exit of some firms after 2007 which could have reduced the sample size drastically. The findings emanating from this study suggests that government should focus much more on implementing competitive policies and bother less on writing corporate governance codes.

The results demonstrate that corporate governance had no significant impact on productivity growth even when it was interacted with competition. However, competition on its own had a significant impact on productivity which means that Nigeria should concentrate more on building a competitive private sector, and in this regard, government should try and pursue policies that will foster competition and eliminate monopolistic tendencies. Once, there is effective competition, the corporate governance may be strengthened. However, the interactive effect of competition and bank loans was found with a positive and significant impact which indicates that banks as alternate corporate governance mechanism can only be effective if competition is strong. This goes to show that the financial sector may not be able to effectively and positively impact the real sector in Nigeria if the prevailing level of competition is low. In such a situation finance may not be channelled to projects that have long-run implications on sustainable growth and development.

Socially, if the environment for competition is not fostered in Nigeria, the country may face an uphill task in combating the problem of poverty through a private sector-led solution. Hence, there is a need for government to begin to formulate comprehensive competition policies that will ensure that resources are optimally utilized in Nigeria.

In the context of Nigeria, this study is novel, the use of productivity growth as against firm financial performance is unique for Nigeria while the use of GMM method of analysis helps in reducing the effect of endogeneity inherent in corporate governance and performance of firms in Nigeria.