We congratulate Dr. Micha Kaiser on winning the Young Researcher Paper Award 2020 of our faculty! [24.06.20]
His article "Benford's law as an indicator of survey reliability- Can we trust our data?" was published in the Journal of Economic surveys in 2019 and was honoured by the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Hohenheim and the prize donor Mr. Christian Hutter from the company ideas&more.Kaiser's contribution analyzes the extent to which different income measures are in accordance with Benford's law. Benford's law can be used to test the reliability of data sets. Kaiser's paper uses a Benford analysis to test the quality of six survey data sets that are widely used in empirical social research. The results suggest that although income data generally obey Benford's law, almost all of these data sets exhibit significant deviations from it, which can be interpreted as a strong indicator of potential reliability problems in the survey data. Kaiser was able to confirm his results using simulation. Furthermore, it was found that validity deficiencies are different for income data at the household level and for data at the individual level. According to these findings, researchers should focus on characteristics and information measured at household level to reduce observation errors.