INMABB 05456
INSTITUTO DE MATEMATICA BAHIA BLANCA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
On the possibility of using Benford´s Law to Analyze Manipulation in Inflation Statistics
Autor/es:
MAXIMILIANO MIRANDA ZANETT; DELBIANCO, FERNANDO; FERNANDO TOHMÉ
Lugar:
La Plata
Reunión:
Congreso; Congreso de la AAEP; 2018
Institución organizadora:
Universidad Nacional de La Plata
Resumen:
Benford´s law is a well-known regularity in the frequency distribution of first (or most significant) digits found in many data sets. This regularity has been employed in the past to perform forensic analysis of data, including macroeconomic series.In this paper, we propound the usage of the regularity to study possible manipulations of price and inflation index series. To this end, we evaluate fulfillment of the regularity in macroeconomic series of price and inflation for some representative countries. We resort to simulations to study the relationship between price and inflation indexes regarding compliance of Benford´s law, possible problems of analyzing the regularity using price indexes (mainly, due to splicing of series, and base-year re-scaling), and how the regularity could be lost in the inflation series when some simple manipulations are performed over inflation data.
