It’s not easy to generate alpha as an analyst at a quant fund these days. Most of the signals that are likely to make money have been discovered, so you find yourself sitting around running a lot of back-testing regressions on anything that could, however implausibly, predict financial results. It’s a stressful, lonely job, and if you’re low on good ideas your mind may wander to whatever is closest to hand.

That appears to be how Tatu Westling of the University of Helsinki came up with this:

The question is whether and how strongly the average sizes of male organ are associated with GDPs between 1960 and 1985? It is argued here that the average size – the erect length, to be precise – of male organ in population has a strong predictive power of economic development during the period. The exact causality can only be speculated at this point but the correlations are robust.

What could possibly go wrong? We took a look.
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