Benford's law states that the leading significant digits in real-world data sets, provided the data span several orders of magnitude, are not normally uniformly distributed. Deviations from this law may indicate human intervention, even fraud. The data on Chinese banks' non-performing loans has...

Chinese banks likely have more non-performing loans (NPLs) than officially reported. As hidden NPLs earn no interest income, loan quality problems may erode the gross interest income of banks. Using stochastic frontier analysis, we estimate the interest income of a hypothetical...