SUSTAINABLE BANKING PRINCIPLES AND PERFORMANCE OF DEPOSIT MONEY BANKS IN NIGERIA: AN ECONOMETRIC ANALYSIS

The study looked at sustainable principles and the performance of DMBs Nigeria for 2000-2020. The actual objectives include assessing the indicators of sustainable principles of banking, such as the ATM, CPS, LR and CR, as well as how DMBs’ performance measured by the ROA is affected by those factors. Data were retrieved from CBN documents such as bank supervisory annual report, statistical bulletin, and the NDIC annual reports for the period 2000-2019 were used as a secondary source of data (time series data) in this study. The findings revealed that ATM and CPS have a negative yet not significant effect on the ROA of DMBs, whereas LR and CR which also revealed a negative effect on ROA were significant after all. Following the outcome of this result, it was agreed that a mixed association exists between sustainable principles of banking and performance. Hence, the recommendation that modalities be put in place to effectively and efficiently adopt sustainable principles of banking in Nigeria, so as to ensure that banks deliver better services to their clients as well boosting profits. Keywords: Sustainable Banking Principles, Bank Performance, Econometric Analysis

MORTGAGE FINANCING AND HOUSING DELIVERIES IN NIGERIA: ANY LINKAGES?

The paper examined if there exist any linkages between mortgage financing and housing delivery in Nigeria from periods of 2002-2021. Specifically, the paper examined the effect of Primary Mortgage Bank Loans, Federal Mortgage Bank Loans to Mortgage, Microfinance Bank loans to mortgage, and Government Allocation to Housing on housing delivery in Nigeria. Data for the study were sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin and the National Bureau of statistics (2021) from 2002 to 2021. Meanwhile, the study adopted the OLS estimate. Various pre-estimation and diagnostic tests considered include:  Heteroskedascity test, Ramsey Reset Test, and variance inflation factors/multi-collinearity test. The study reported that, Primary Mortgage Bank Loans have significant adverse effects on housing delivery. Meanwhile, Federal Mortgage Bank Loans to Mortgage improves housing delivery minimally. More so, MBLM and finance Bank loans to mortgage and Government Allocation to Housing are major contributing factor to housing delivery in Nigeria within the periods under review. Hence, the paper concludes that, both microfinance loans to mortgage institutions and government allocations to housing are major drivers of housing delivery in the periods under review. Accordingly, the paper recommends that, the primary Mortgage Bank should heighten efforts towards improving on reforms and policies that encourage the use of loans by mortgage institution for sustained growth and greater house development. More so, the federal Mortgage Bank should introduce new, flexible, and versatile loan policies suited to the prevailing conditions in the country taking into account dynamic changes in the environment. Keywords: Mortgage Financing, Housing Deliveries, Linkages

Disentangling superconducting and magnetic orders in NaFe_1-xNi_xAs using muon spin rotation

Muon spin rotation and relaxation studies have been performed on a "111" family of iron-based superconductors NaFe_1-xNi_xAs. Static magnetic order was characterized by obtaining the temperature and doping dependences of the local ordered magnetic moment size and the volume fraction of the magnetically ordered regions. For x = 0 and 0.4 %, a transition to a nearly-homogeneous long range magnetically ordered state is observed, while for higher x than 0.4 % magnetic order becomes more disordered and is completely suppressed for x = 1.5 %. The magnetic volume fraction continuously decreases with increasing x. The combination of magnetic and superconducting volumes implies that a spatially-overlapping coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity spans a large region of the T-x phase diagram for NaFe_1-xNi_xAs . A strong reduction of both the ordered moment size and the volume fraction is observed below the superconducting T_C for x = 0.6, 1.0, and 1.3 %, in contrast to other iron pnictides in which one of these two parameters exhibits a reduction below TC, but not both. The suppression of magnetic order is further enhanced with increased Ni doping, leading to a reentrant non-magnetic state below T_C for x = 1.3 %. The reentrant behavior indicates an interplay between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity involving competition for the same electrons. These observations are consistent with the sign-changing s-wave superconducting state, which is expected to appear on the verge of microscopic coexistence and phase separation with magnetism. We also present a universal linear relationship between the local ordered moment size and the antiferromagnetic ordering temperature TN across a variety of iron-based superconductors. We argue that this linear relationship is consistent with an itinerant-electron approach, in which Fermi surface nesting drives antiferromagnetic ordering.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, Correspondence should be addressed to Prof. Yasutomo Uemura: [email protected]

COVID-19 crisis and stock market volatility in Nigeria: A GARCH model approach

The economic downturns locally and internationally due to the COVID-19 crisis were the main motivation for this study. However, rather than broadly examining economic indices, this paper focused on the reaction of the Nigerian stock market in terms of volatility to the crisis. The specific objectives of the study were to identify differences in market performance due to the COVID crisis, determine volatility persistence and ascertain the leverage effects of the news on stocks on the stock exchange floor. Adopting an ex-post facto research design, monthly time-series All-Share Index data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, GARCH(1,1), and EGARCH models. It was found that volatility existed in the market during the COVID-19 crisis however volatility persistence was low. EGARCH results showed asymmetric parameters did not exist revealing the form of leverage effect COVID-19 posed to the market. The market thus had identical responses to both bad and good news of COVID-19 announcements of the same magnitude. It was recommended that regulatory authorities and policymakers be proactive in their approach to forecasting market performance to reduce the negative effects of bad news on market indices

COVID-19 Pandemic and the Performance of Financial Firms in Nigeria

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance and capital adequacy of Nigerian banks is explored in this article. The aim of the study was to see how the virus outbreak affects the performance and capital adequacy of Nigerian banks. For the purposes of this study, an actual post-research budget was used. The number of confirmed positive cases in Nigeria since 2020 is used as an indicator of the virus, with capital adequacy measured by capital adequacy ratio (CAR) and bank financial performance measured by the performance of assets (ROA). In one model, positive cases of the Covid virus were linked to the banks' CAR, while in the other, positive Covid cases were linked to the banks' ROA. Secondary statistics are included in CBN's annual report for the year ended 2020, to be released in 2021. Conventional least squares (OLS) regression estimates were used to analyze the data. . According to the results, the Covid pandemic has had a positive and significant effect on the capital adequacy of Nigerian banks. This can be seen in CBN's announcement of a higher equity level for 2020 of 15.2%, up from 14.6% in 201

Physical, mechanical and hydration kinetics of particleboards manufactured with woody biomass (Cupressus lusitanica, Gmelina arborea, Tectona grandis), agricultural resources, and Tetra Pak packages

Lignocellulosic wastes resulting from agricultural activities as well as Tetra Pak residues from urban centres can cause significant levels of pollution. A possible action to minimize this problem is to use them in the production of particleboards. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the physical, mechanical, and hydration properties of particleboards manufactured with the mixture of woody biomass (Cupressus lusitanica, Gmelina arborea, and Tectona grandis) and either agricultural wastes [pineapple leaves (Ananas comosus) and palm residues (Elaeis guineensis)] or Tetra Pak residues (TP). The results show that the particleboards prepared with TP and woody biomass can reduce the swelling and water absorption in up to 40% and 50% compared with particleboards without TP. Also, these particleboards had increased flexure resistance and shear stress (up to 100%) compared with those without TP. On the contrary, particleboards prepared with pineapple leaves in combination with woody biomass showed the lowest mechanical properties, particularly for tensile strength, hardness, glue-line shear, and nail and screw evaluation.Los desechos lignocelulósicos resultantes de las actividades agrícolas, así como los residuos de Tetra Pak de los centros urbanos pueden causar niveles significativos de contaminación. Una posible acción para minimizar este problema es usarlos en la producción de tableros de partículas. El propósito de este estudio fue evaluar las propiedades físicas, mecánicas y de hidratación de tableros de partículas fabricados con la mezcla de biomasa leñosa (Cupressus lusitanica, Gmelina arborea y Tectona grandis) y residuos agrícolas [hojas de piña (Ananas comosus) y residuos de palma (Elaeis guineensis)] o residuos de Tetra Pak (TP). Los resultados muestran que los tableros de partículas preparados con TP y biomasa leñosa pueden reducir la hinchazón y la absorción de agua hasta en un 40% y 50% en comparación con los tableros de partículas sin TP. Además, estos tableros de partículas tenían una mayor resistencia a la flexión y al esfuerzo cortante (hasta 100%) en comparación con aquellos sin TP. Por el contrario, los tableros de partículas preparados con hojas de piña en combinación con biomasa leñosa mostraron las propiedades mecánicas más bajas, particularmente para la resistencia a la tracción, la dureza, el corte de la línea de pegamento y la evaluación de clavos y tornillos.Universidad Nacional, Costa RicaEscuela de Químic

Explainable COVID-19 infections identification and delineation using calibrated pseudo labels

The upheaval brought by the arrival of the COVID19 pandemic has continued to bring fresh challenges over the past two years. During this COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a need for rapid identification of infected patients and specific delineation of infection areas in computed tomography (CT) images. Although deep supervised learning methods have been established quickly, the scarcity of both image-level and pixel-level labels as well as the lack of explainable transparency still hinder the applicability of AI. Can we identify infected patients and delineate the infections with extreme minimal supervision? Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated promising performance under limited labelled data and sufficient unlabelled data. Inspired by semisupervised learning, we propose a model-agnostic calibrated pseudo-labelling strategy and apply it under a consistency regularization framework to generate explainable identification and delineation results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with the combination of limited labelled data and sufficient unlabelled data or weakly-labelled data. Extensive experiments have shown that our model can efficiently utilize limited labelled data and provide explainable classification and segmentation results for decision-making in clinical routine. The code is available at https://github.com/ayanglab/XAI COVID-19