Detecting problems in survey data using Benford's Law

Journal of Human Resources

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-24

  Judge, George ^a   Schechter, Laura ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DATA QUALITY; DATA SET; DETECTION METHOD; SURVEY;

NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 67649366072     PISSN: 0022166X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3368/jhr.44.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Benford, Frank. 1938. "The Law of Anomalous Numbers." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 78(4):551-72.
2. Berger, Arno, and Theodore P. Hill. 2007. "Newton's Method Obeys Benford's Law." American Mathematical Monthly 114(7):588-601.
3. Biemer, Paul P., Robert M. Groves, Lars E. Lyberg, Nancy A. Mathiowetz, and Seymour Sudman, eds. 1991. Measurement Errors in Surveys. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
4. Carslaw, Charles A. P. N. 1988. "Anomalies in Income Numbers: Evidence of Goal Oriented Behavior." Accounting Review 63(2):321-27.
5. Cho, Wendy K. T., and Brian J. Gaines. 2007. "Breaking the (Benford) Law: Statistical Fraud Detection in Campaign Finance." The American Statistician 61(3):1-6.
6. de Marchi, Scott, and James T. Hamilton. 2006. "Assessing the Accuracy of Self-Reported Data: An Evaluation of the Toxics Release Inventory." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 32(1):57-76.
7. Diaconis, Persi. 1977. "The Distribution of Leading Digits and Uniform Distribution Mod 1." The Annals of Probability 5(1):72-81.
8. Durtschi, Cindy, William Hillison, and Carl Pacini. 2004. "The Effective Use of Benford's Law to Assist in Detecting Fraud in Accounting Data." Journal of Forensic Accounting 5(1):17-34.
9. Geyer, Christina Lynn, and Patricia Pepple Williamson. 2004. "Detecting Fraud in Data Sets using Benford's Law." Computation in Statistics: Simulation and Computation 33(1):229-46.
10. Giles, David E. 2007. "Benford's Law and Naturally Occurring Prices in Certain eBay Auctions." Applied Economics Letters 14(3):157-61.
11. Glewwe, Paul and Hai-Anh Hoang Dang. 2005. "The Impact of Decentralized Data Entry on the Quality of Household Survey Data in Developing Countries: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Vietnam." Unpublished.
12. Grendar, Marian, George Judge, and Laura Schechter. 2007. "An Empirical Non-Parametric Likelihood Family of Data-Based Benford-Like Distributions." Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 380:429-38.
13. Grosh, Margaret, and Paul Glewwe, eds. 2000. Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries: Lessons from 15 Years of the Living Standards Measurement Study, Washington D.C.: The World Bank.
14. Groves, Robert M. 1989. Survey Errors and Survey Costs, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
15. Hill, Theodore P. 1995. "A Statistical Derivation of the Significant-Digit Law." Statistical Science 10(4):354-63.
16. Hill, Theodore P., and Klaus Schürger. 2005. "Regularity of Digits and Significant Digits of Random Variables." Stochastic Processes and Their Applications 115(10):1723-43.
17. Leemis, Lawrence M., Bruce W. Schmeiser, and Diane L. Evans. 2000. "Survival Distributions Satisfying Benford's Law." The American Statistician 54(4):236-41.
18. Livio, Mario. 2002. The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number. New York: Broadway.
19. Morrow, John M. 2007. "Benford's Law, Families of Distributions, and a Test Basis." Unpublished.
20. Newcomb, Simon. 1881. "Note on the Frequency of Use of the Different Digits in Natural Numbers." American Journal of Mathematics 4(1):39-40.
21. Nigrini, Mark J. 1996. "A Taxpayer Compliance Application of Benford's Law." Journal of the American Taxation Association 18(1):72-91.
22. Nye, John, and Charles Moul. 2007. "The Political Economy of Numbers: On the Application of Benford's Law to International Macroeconomic Statistics." The B. E. Journal of Macroeconomics 7(1 (Topics)).
23. Philipson, Tomas, and Anup Malani. 1999. "Measurement Errors: A Principal Investigator-Agent Approach." Journal of Econometrics 91(2):273-98.
24. Pietronero, Luciano, Erio Tosatti, Valentino Tosatti, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2001. "Explaining the Uneven Distribution of Numbers in Nature: The Laws of Benford and Zipf." Physica A: Statistical Methods and its Applications 293(1-2):297-304.
25. Raimi, Ralph. 1976. "The First Digit Problem." American Mathematical Monthly 83(7):521-38.
26. Rodriguez, Ricardo J. 2004. "First Significant Digit Patterns from Mixtures of Uniform Distributions." The American Statistician 58(1):64-71.
27. Schatte, Peter. 1988. "On Mantissa Distributions in Computing and Benford's Law." Journal of Information Processing and Cybernetics 24(10):443-55.
28. Scott, Paul D., and Maria Fasli. 2001. Benford's Law: An Empirical Investigation and a Novel Explanation. Unpublished.
29. Stephens, Michael A. 1970. "Use of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Cramer-Von Mises and Related Statistics without Extensive Tables." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 32(1):115-22.
30. Sudman, Seymour, Norman M. Bradburn, and Norbert Schwarz. 1996. Thinking About Answers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
31. Varian, Hal. 1972. "Benford's Law." The American Statistician 26(3):65.