IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/apeclt/v18y2011i10p893-899.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Tracking the Libor rate

Author

Listed:
  • Rosa Abrantes-Metz
  • Sofia Villas-Boas
  • George Judge

Abstract

With an eye to providing a methodology for tracking the dynamic integrity of prices for important market indicators, in this article we use Benford second digit (SD) reference distribution to track the daily London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) over the period 2005 to 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 16 banks from which the Libor is computed and the usefulness of the Libor as a major economic indicator.

Suggested Citation

  • Rosa Abrantes-Metz & Sofia Villas-Boas & George Judge, 2011. "Tracking the Libor rate," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(10), pages 893-899.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:18:y:2011:i:10:p:893-899
    DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2010.515197
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&doi=10.1080/13504851.2010.515197&magic=repec&7C&7C8674ECAB8BB840C6AD35DC6213A474B5
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13504851.2010.515197?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
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. David Giles, 2007. "Benford's law and naturally occurring prices in certain ebaY auctions," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 157-161.
    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).
    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. Mir, T.A., 2014. "The Benford law behavior of the religious activity data," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 408(C), pages 1-9.
    2. Vadim S. Balashov & Yuxing Yan & Xiaodi Zhu, 2020. "Who Manipulates Data During Pandemics? Evidence from Newcomb-Benford Law," Papers 2007.14841, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2021.
    3. 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.
    4. Parnes, Dror, 2022. "Banks' off-balance sheet manipulations," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 314-331.
    5. Kalaichelvan, Mohandass & Lim Kai Jie, Shawn, 2012. "A Critical Evaluation of the Significance of Round Numbers in European Equity Markets in Light of the Predictions from Benford’s Law," MPRA Paper 40960, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Karlo Kauko, 2024. "How to detect what drives deviations from Benford’s law? An application to bank deposit data," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 67(3), pages 1045-1061, September.
    7. 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.
    8. Montag, Josef, 2017. "Identifying odometer fraud in used car market data," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 10-23.
    9. Montag, Josef, 2015. "Identifying Odometer Fraud: Evidence from the Used Car Market in the Czech Republic," MPRA Paper 65182, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Holz, Carsten A., 2014. "The quality of China's GDP statistics," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 309-338.
    11. 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).
    12. Shi, Jing & Ausloos, Marcel & Zhu, Tingting, 2018. "Benford’s law first significant digit and distribution distances for testing the reliability of financial reports in developing countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 492(C), pages 878-888.
    13. 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.
    14. Faraji Kasidi & H. Chaturvedi & Rahul Singh, 2010. "Detecting Data Error and Inaccuracy," Margin: The Journal of Applied Economic Research, National Council of Applied Economic Research, vol. 4(4), pages 405-425, November.
    15. Cheng Zhao & Chong Alex Wang, 2023. "A cross-site comparison of online review manipulation using Benford’s law," Electronic Commerce Research, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 365-406, March.
    16. 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.
    17. T. Mir, 2016. "The leading digit distribution of the worldwide illicit financial flows," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 271-281, January.
    18. M. Jayasree & C. S. Pavana Jyothi & P. Ramya, 2018. "Benford’s Law and Stock Market—The Implications for Investors: The Evidence from India Nifty Fifty," Jindal Journal of Business Research, , vol. 7(2), pages 103-121, December.
    19. Tariq Ahmad Mir & Marcel Ausloos & Roy Cerqueti, 2014. "Benford's law predicted digit distribution of aggregated income taxes: the surprising conformity of Italian cities and regions," Papers 1410.2890, arXiv.org.
    20. Ioana Sorina Deleanu, 2017. "Do Countries Consistently Engage in Misinforming the International Community about Their Efforts to Combat Money Laundering? Evidence Using Benford’s Law," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(1), pages 1-19, January.

    More about this item

    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:taf:apeclt:v:18:y:2011:i:10:p:893-899. 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEL20 .

    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.