Thought du Jour

This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres. Economic growth between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ, and it alone explains 20% of the variation in GDP growth. With due reservations it is also found to be more important determinant of GDP growth than country’s political regime type. Controlling for male organ slows convergence and mitigates the negative effect of population growth on economic development slightly. Although all evidence is suggestive at this stage, the `male organ hypothesis’ put forward here is robust to exhaustive set of controls and rests on surprisingly strong correlations.

Tatu Westling, “Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?“, Helsinki Center of Economic Research (HECER), Discussion Paper No. 335, July 2011.

That is the abstract of this paper, which is technically well done. The paper is not a hoax, but I suspect that the author may have written it tongue-in-cheek, as a criticism of econometric regressions of GDP and GDP growth on all manner of variables.

Tatu Westling is an economist listed in the staff directory of the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki.

Mr Westling has one other publication listed in the university archives: his Master’s Thesis, with a less exciting title (“Local network externalities and market dynamics: an agent-based computational economics approach”, 27 August 2006).

Tags: growth

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 at 15:39 and is filed under Development Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.