Two challenges in the literature have inspired this paper. First, the highly contradictory puzzle of debates on the “public budget–economic growth” correlation, explainable in great measure by the inadequacy of involved modeling tools (assumptions and specifications) with studied samples....

There is a widespread belief among economists that adding additional variables to a regression model causes higher standard errors. This note shows that, in general, this belief is unfounded and that the impact of adding variables on coefficients’ standard errors is unclear. The concept of...