Checking financial markets via Benford’s law1

In this paper we compare the daily distribution of first significant digits of S&P 500’s stock prices and returns against the Benford’s law. In particular, the analysis is performed on 3067 days for 361 out of the 500 stocks. We obtain that the overall distribution of first significant digits roughly follows the Benford’s law, confirming previous claims of the literature, and obtain that the majority of the daily distribution of return first significant digits follow Benford’s law