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Benford's Law and the FSD Distribution of Economic Behavioral Micro Data

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  • Judge, George G.
  • Villas-Boas, Sofia B.

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the first significant digit (FSD) distribution of European micro income data and use information theoretic-entropy based methods to investigate the degree to which Benford’s FSD law is consistent with the nature of these economic behavioral systems. We demonstrate that Benford’s law is not an empirical phenomenon that occurs only in important distributions in physical statistics, but that it also arises in self-organizing dynamic economic behavioral systems. The empirical likelihood member of the minimum divergence-entropy family, is used to recover country based income FSD probability density functions and to demonstrate the implications of using a Benford prior reference distribution in economic behavioral system information recovery.
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  • Judge, George G. & Villas-Boas, Sofia B., 2017. "Benford's Law and the FSD Distribution of Economic Behavioral Micro Data," Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series qt4bb8k9zw, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:agrebk:qt4bb8k9zw
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Pietronero, L. & Tosatti, E. & Tosatti, V. & Vespignani, A., 2001. "Explaining the uneven distribution of numbers in nature: the laws of Benford and Zipf," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 293(1), pages 297-304.
    2. Shao, Lijing & Ma, Bo-Qiang, 2010. "The significant digit law in statistical physics," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(16), pages 3109-3116.
    3. 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).
    4. Grendar, Marian & Judge, George & Schechter, Laura, 2007. "An empirical non-parametric likelihood family of data-based Benford-like distributions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 380(C), pages 429-438.
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    Cited by:

    1. Katherine M. Anderson & Kevin Dayaratna & Drew Gonshorowski & Steven J. Miller, 2022. "A New Benford Test for Clustered Data with Applications to American Elections," Stats, MDPI, vol. 5(3), pages 1-15, August.
    2. González Fernando Antonio Ignacio, 2019. "Detecting Anomalous Data in Household Surveys: Evidence for Argentina," Journal of Social and Economic Statistics, Sciendo, vol. 8(2), pages 1-10, December.
    3. Hao, Zhuang & Zhang, Xudong & Wang, Yuze, 2024. "Assessing the accuracy of self-reported health expenditure data: Evidence from two public surveys in China," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 356(C).
    4. Dang, Canh Thien & Owens, Trudy, 2020. "Does transparency come at the cost of charitable services? Evidence from investigating British charities," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 172(C), pages 314-343.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social and Behavioral Sciences;

    JEL classification:

    • C1 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General
    • C10 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - General
    • C24 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Truncated and Censored Models; Switching Regression Models; Threshold Regression Models

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