BENFORD'S LAW AS AN INDICATOR OF SURVEY RELIABILITY—CAN WE TRUST OUR DATA?

Micha Kaiser

Journal of Economic Surveys, 2019, vol. 33, issue 5, 1602-1618

Abstract: This paper analyzes how closely different income measures conform to Benford's law, a mathematical predictor of probable first digit distribution across many sets of numbers. Because Benford's law can be used to test data set reliability, we use a Benford analysis to assess the quality of six widely used survey data sets. Our findings indicate that although income generally obeys Benford's law, almost all the data sets show substantial discrepancies from it, which we interpret as a strong indicator of reliability issues in the survey data. This result is confirmed by a simulation, which demonstrates that household level income data do not manifest the same poor performance as individual level data. This finding implies that researchers should focus on household level characteristics whenever possible to reduce observation errors.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12338

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jecsur:v:33:y:2019:i:5:p:1602-1618

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0950-0804

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Economic Surveys from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().