Corruption and Growth Under Weak Identification

The goal of this paper is to revisit the influential work of Mauro [1995] focusing on the strength of his results under weak identification. He finds a negative impact of corruption on investment and economic growth that appears to be robust to endogeneity when using two-stage least squares (2SLS). Since the inception of Mauro [1995], much literature has focused on 2SLS methods revealing the dangers of estimation and thus inference under weak identification. We reproduce the original results of Mauro [1995] with a high level of confidence and show that the instrument used in the original work is in fact 'weak' as defined by Staiger and Stock [1997]. Thus we update the analysis using a test statistic robust to weak instruments. Our results suggest that under Mauro's original model there is a high probability that the parameters of interest are locally almost unidentified in multivariate specifications. To address this problem, we also investigate other instruments commonly used in the corruption literature and obtain similar results.

Street-Ball: The Myth of the Ghetto Basketball Star

In recent decades, countless scholars have examined the developing trend of African American dominance in United States’ professional sports. Many have hypothesized that this over-representation is caused by the presumed reliance on sports as an avenue out of poverty for the African American youths. This trend, it is believed, has a highly detrimental effect the African American community. In actuality, this argument is flawed because it works under the stereotypical assumption that the overwhelming majority of African Americans come from abject poverty. To dispel this fallacy, the author has analyzed the upbringings of each All-National Basketball League First Team player over the past thirty years. The author discovered that while the majority of the players selected were African American, only a small percentage of these athletes were raised in a poverty-stricken environment. Logically, this would not be the case if poor African Americans relied more heavily on sports than middle-class African Americans. This data proves that stereotypes, not empirical evidence, are the substance of nearly every previous study conducted on the topic.

A Simple Statistical Test of Violation of the Weak Axiom of Cost Minimization

A problem with a practical application of Varian.s Weak Axiom of Cost Minimization is that an observed violation may be due to random variation in the output quantities produced by firms rather than due to inefficiency on the part of the firm. In this paper, unlike in Varian (1985), the output rather than the input quantities are treated as random and an alternative statistical test of the violation of WACM is proposed. We assume that there is no technical inefficiency and provide a test of the hypothesis that an observed violation of WACM is merely due to random variations in the output levels of the firms being compared.. We suggest an intuitive approach for specifying a value of the variance of the noise term that is needed for the test. The paper includes an illustrative example utilizing a data set relating to a number of U.S. airlines.

Variational Calculation of the Hydrogen Molecular Cation using Maple (II). The pi and pi-star Orbitals

The pi and pi-star orbitals of the hydrogen molecular cation are obtained using Maple in the same manner as the sigma and sigma-star orbitals were obtained in paper-36.