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...

The SEC XBRL mandate enables the gathering of accounting numbers to be fully automatic in a database-like manner which provides vast opportunities for financial analysis. Using this functionality, this study proposes a simple analytical prescreening measure that uses abnormal digit distributions...