IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jns/jbstat/v243y2023i1p29-38n8.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Bielefeld May In Fact Not Exist – Empirical Evidence From Official Population Data

Author

Listed:
  • Winter Patrick

    (Independent Researcher, Berlin, Germany)

Abstract

The “Bielefeld conspiracy” has long disputed the existence of Bielefeld, a (supposed) German city. In this paper, an approach is developed to test such a theory empirically by auditing officially reported population numbers, arguing that real cities would not fake these. It is shown that Bielefeld’s data, in fact, violate the Benford law, a statistical law that they should follow if they were genuine. This anomaly is found only for Bielefeld, in contrast to all other tested similar and dissimilar cities, across two decades, and with highest significance by five statistical tests. The Bielefeld conspiracy remains as the most or even only plausible explanation for these findings.

Suggested Citation

  • Winter Patrick, 2023. "Bielefeld May In Fact Not Exist – Empirical Evidence From Official Population Data," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 243(1), pages 29-38, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:jns:jbstat:v:243:y:2023:i:1:p:29-38:n:8
    DOI: 10.1515/jbnst-2022-0038
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2022-0038
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1515/jbnst-2022-0038?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fewster, R. M., 2009. "A Simple Explanation of Benford's Law," The American Statistician, American Statistical Association, vol. 63(1), pages 26-32.
    2. Tam Cho, Wendy K. & Gaines, Brian J., 2007. "Breaking the (Benford) Law: Statistical Fraud Detection in Campaign Finance," The American Statistician, American Statistical Association, vol. 61, pages 218-223, August.
    3. repec:cai:poeine:pope_204_0753 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Roy Cerqueti & Claudio Lupi, 2023. "Severe testing of Benford’s law," TEST: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 32(2), pages 677-694, June.
    2. Matthew A. Cole & David J. Maddison & Liyun Zhang, 2020. "Testing the emission reduction claims of CDM projects using the Benford’s Law," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 160(3), pages 407-426, June.
    3. Montag, Josef, 2017. "Identifying odometer fraud in used car market data," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 10-23.
    4. Wang, Delu & Chen, Fan & Mao, Jinqi & Liu, Nannan & Rong, Fangyu, 2022. "Are the official national data credible? Empirical evidence from statistics quality evaluation of China's coal and its downstream industries," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).
    5. Willis A. Jones, 2020. "A Benford Analysis of National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Finance Data," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 21(3), pages 234-255, April.
    6. Stéphane Blondeau Da Silva, 2022. "An Alternative to the Oversimplifying Benford’s Law in Experimental Fields," Sankhya B: The Indian Journal of Statistics, Springer;Indian Statistical Institute, vol. 84(2), pages 778-808, November.
    7. Ronelle Burger & Canh Thien Dang & Trudy Owens, 2017. "Better performing NGOs do report more accurately: Evidence from investigating Ugandan NGO financial accounts," Discussion Papers 2017-10, University of Nottingham, CREDIT.
    8. Louie Rivers & Tamara Dempsey & Jade Mitchell & Carole Gibbs, 2015. "Environmental Regulation and Enforcement: Structures, Processes and the Use of Data for Fraud Detection," Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management (JEAPM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 17(04), pages 1-29, December.
    9. Sitsofe Tsagbey & Miguel de Carvalho & Garritt L. Page, 2017. "All Data are Wrong, but Some are Useful? Advocating the Need for Data Auditing," The American Statistician, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 71(3), pages 231-235, July.
    10. Philip E Hulme & Danish A Ahmed & Phillip J Haubrock & Brooks A Kaiser & Melina Kourantidou & Boris Leroy & Shana M Mcdermott, 2024. "Widespread imprecision in estimates of the economic costs of invasive alien species worldwide," Post-Print hal-04633043, HAL.
    11. Qiuzi Fu & Sofia B. Villas-Boas & George Judge, 2019. "Does china income FSDs follow Benford? A comparison between Chinese income first significant digit distribution with Benford distribution," China Economic Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1), pages 68-76, January.
    12. 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.
    13. Kauko, Karlo, 2019. "Benford's law and Chinese banks' non-performing loans," BOFIT Discussion Papers 25/2019, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT).
    14. John Morrow, 2014. "Benford's Law, Families of Distributions and a Test Basis," CEP Discussion Papers dp1291, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    15. Edward J. Lusk & Michael Halperin, 2014. "Detecting Newcomb-Benford Digital Frequency Anomalies in the Audit Context: Suggested Chi2 Test Possibilities," Accounting and Finance Research, Sciedu Press, vol. 3(2), pages 191-191, May.
    16. Baumgartner, Tim & Güttler, André, 2022. "Bitcoin flash crash on May 19, 2021: What did really happen on Binance?," IWH Discussion Papers 25/2022, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
    17. Stefan Günnel & Karl-Heinz Tödter, 2009. "Does Benford’s Law hold in economic research and forecasting?," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 36(3), pages 273-292, August.
    18. Holz, Carsten A., 2014. "The quality of China's GDP statistics," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 309-338.
    19. Lee, Joanne & Cho, Wendy K. Tam & Judge, George G., 2010. "Stigler's approach to recovering the distribution of first significant digits in natural data sets," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 80(2), pages 82-88, January.
    20. Wójcik, Michał Ryszard, 2014. "A characterization of Benford’s law through generalized scale-invariance," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 1-5.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    population data; Benford law; Bielefeld conspiracy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H83 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - Public Administration
    • C46 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Specific Distributions

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jns:jbstat:v:243:y:2023:i:1:p:29-38:n:8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.