  Nearby dwarf galaxies exhibit tight correlations between their global stellar
and dynamical properties, such as circular velocity, mass-to-light ratio,
stellar mass, surface brightness, and metallicity. Such correlations have often
been attributed to gas or metal-rich outflows driven by supernova energy
feedback to the interstellar medium. We use high-resolution cosmological
simulations of high-redshift galaxies with and without energy feedback, as well
as analytic modeling, to investigate whether the observed correlations can
arise without supernova-driven outflows. We find that the simulated dwarf
galaxies exhibit correlations similar to those observed as early as z~10,
regardless of whether supernova feedback is included. We also show that the
correlations can be well reproduced by our analytic model that accounts for
realistic gas inflow but assumes no outflows, and star formation rate obeying
the Kennicutt-Schmidt law with a critical density threshold. We argue that
correlations in simulated galaxies arise due to the increasingly inefficient
conversion of gas into stars in low-mass dwarf galaxies rather than
supernova-driven outflows. We also show that the decrease of the observed
effective yield in low-mass objects, often used as an indicator of gas and
metal outflows, can be reasonably reproduced in our simulations without
outflows. We show that this trend can arise if a significant fraction of metals
in small galaxies is spread to the outer regions of the halo outside the
stellar extent via mixing. In this case the effective yield can be
significantly underestimated if only metals within the stellar radius are taken
into account. Measurements of gas metallicity in the outskirts of gaseous disks
of dwarfs would thus provide a key test of such explanation.
