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

Artikel

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.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Journal: Journal of Economic Surveys ; ISSN: 1467-6419 ; Volume: 33 ; Year: 2019 ; Issue: 5 ; Pages: 1602-1618 ; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Methodological Issues: General ; Statistical Simulation Methods: General ; Specific Distributions; Specific Statistics ; Large Data Sets: Modeling and Analysis ; Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data; Data Access ; Health: General
• Thema: Benford´s law ; Data quality ; Fraud detection ; Measurement error ; Survey quality

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Kaiser, Micha
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Wiley
• (wo): Hoboken, NJ
• (wann): 2019

Weitere Informationen

• DOI: doi:10.1111/joes.12338
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/230051
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:44 MEZ