Tracking the Libor Rate
Abstract
With an eye to providing a methodology for tracking the dynamic integrity of prices for important market indicators, in this paper we use Benford second digit reference distribution to track the daily London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) over the period 2005-2008. This reference, known as Benford’s law, is present in many naturally occurring numerical data sets as well as in several financial data sets. We find that in two recent periods Libor rates depart significantly from the expected Benford reference distribution. This raises potential concerns relative to the unbiased nature of the signals coming from the sixteen banks from which the Libor is computed and the usefulness of the Libor as a major economic indicator.Download Info
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Paper provided by Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley in its series Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series with number qt2p33x7dk.Length:
Date of creation: 11 Mar 2013
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cdl:agrebk:qt2p33x7dk
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Related research
Keywords: Agricultural and Resource Economics; Agriculture; Agriculture Operations; and Related Sciences; Economics; market rate data; Libor; Benford’s law; second digit distributions;Other versions of this item:
- Rosa Abrantes-Metz & Sofia Villas-Boas & George Judge, 2011. "Tracking the Libor rate," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 18(10), pages 893-899.
- Abrantes-Metz, Rosa & Villas-Boas, Sofia B. & Judge, George G., 2010. "Tracking the Libor rate," CUDARE Working Paper Series 1108R, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Policy, revised Jul 2010.
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- David Giles, 2007.
"Benford's law and naturally occurring prices in certain ebaY auctions,"
Applied Economics Letters,
Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 157-161.
- David E. Giles, 2005. "Benford’s Law and Naturally Occurring Prices in Certain ebaY Auctions," Econometrics Working Papers 0505, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.
- George Judge & Laura Schechter, 2009. "Detecting Problems in Survey Data Using Benford’s Law," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 44(1).
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Andrea Monticini & Daniel L. Thornton, 2013. "The effect of underreporting on LIBOR rates," Working Papers 2013-008, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
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