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 "traditional" types of 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. After identifying an instrument with sufficient strength we fail to reject a zero effect of corruption on investment and economic growth.
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Paper provided by University of Connecticut, Department of Economics in its series Working papers with number
2006-17.
Length: 26 pages Date of creation: Sep 2006 Date of revision:
Mar 2007 Handle: RePEc:uct:uconnp:2006-17
Note: The authors would like to thank Paulo Mauro, Gautam Tripathi, Nicholas Shunda, Christian Zimmermann, and Francis Ahking for comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the contributing participants of the Sixth Annual Missouri Economics Conference for their valuable feedback. Contact details of provider: Postal: University of Connecticut 341 Mansfield Road, Unit 1063 Storrs, CT 06269-1063 Phone: (860) 486-4889 Fax: (860) 486-4463 Web page: http://www.econ.uconn.edu/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christian Zimmermann).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer & Robert Vishny, 1998.
"The Quality of Goverment,"
NBER Working Papers
6727, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Zvika Neeman & M. Daniele Paserman & Avi Simhon, 2004.
"Corruption and Openness,"
Discussion Paper Series
dp353, Center for Rationality and Interactive Decision Theory, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
[Downloadable!]
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