This study examines whether firms expand accounting disclosures in response to perceived market undervaluation. Using a signalling theory framework, this paper predicts that managers will use disclosures to align the market's expectations about future earnings performance with their own. We...

First and higher order digits in data sets of natural and socio-economic processes often follow a distribution called Benford's law. This phenomenon has been used in many business and scientific applications, especially in fraud detection for financial data. In this paper, we analyse whether...

Survey data are potentially affected by cheating interviewers. Even a small number of fabricated interviews might seriously impair the results of further empirical analysis. Besides reinterviews some statistical approaches have been proposed for identifying fabrication of interviews. As a novel...

A sequence of real numbers (xn) is Benford if the significands, i.e. the fractionparts in the floating-point representation of (xn), are distributed logarithmically.Similarly, a discrete-time irreducible and aperiodic finite-state Markov chain withprobability transition matrix P and limiting...

The business reporting standard XBRL offers the opportunity to easily extract and analyze a sufficient number of monetary items out of single annual reports for statistical analysis purposes. Using XBRL 10-K reports filed with the SEC EDGAR system, we derive first digit distributions for single...

This paper focuses on fraud detection in surveys using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data as an example for testing newly methods proposed here. A statistical theorem referred to as Benford's Law states that in many sets of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed, as...

Estimates of the trade elasticity based on actual trade policy changes are scarce, and the few that exist are all over the place. This paper offers a setting where an exogenous increase in a border tax can be used to estimate the trade elasticity. It shows theoretically and empirically that if...

A random variable X is digit-regular (respectively, significant-digit-regular) if the probability that every block of k given consecutive digits (significant digits) appears in the b-adic expansion of X approaches b &supk; as the block moves to the right, for all integers b 1 and k ? 1. Necessary...