HCC: Digital Tribal Government: The Tribal Finance Information Clearinghouse (TFIC)

作为独立的主权政府，印第安部落就像州和地方政府一样，有义务改善其公民的生活。然而，部落政府获得资本的能力要有限得多。许多部落社区往往背负着极低的社会经济因素，包括低教育成就、高失业率、高贫困和低人均收入。在印度，每年有超过500亿美元的资本需求没有得到满足，这在很大程度上是由于部落进入资本市场的障碍。部落处于劣势的原因有很多，但很少有人研究的一个原因是信息不对称。相对较差的市场意识既是部落欠发达的原因，也是任何解决方案的障碍。由于大多数部落在他们可能考虑的任何债务融资策略中都面临信息不对称，因此对免税债券成功的信息共享和整合策略的实证研究将有助于确定在部落处于信息劣势的其他领域诱导共享的合适策略。基于初步工作（IIS 0534905），这个部落金融信息交换中心（TFIC）项目将对信息科学做出三个独特的贡献。首先，它将收集、汇总、分析和传播新的数字内容，包括获取目前无法获得的关于部落免税债券的市场操作数据。其次，它将生成有关阻碍或诱导私人信息为集体信息产品做出贡献的因素的数据。（从广义上讲，深入了解如何设计信息系统来解决信息协作的社会困境正变得越来越重要。）最后，TFIC将是一种信息授权的实践。通过将原始金融数据作为更大基础设施的一部分呈现，包括有关监管、法律和立法变化的更新内容、行业新闻以及提供经验教训的论坛，TFIC将为交易数据增加重要的信息价值。TFIC还将支持有关信息技术的设计和使用及其对政府机构和公民的影响的多学科研究。更广泛的影响没有关于部落与资本市场互动的实证数据，许多研究问题仍然无法回答。有了这个项目，这些问题将首次得到解决，因为TFIC将为研究人员和政策制定者提供一个无与伦比的机会，分析与重要少数群体相关的完整数据集，并确定信息不对称、法律法规或其他变量是否会影响部落的资本市场准入。这些结果不仅会直接影响到印第安人，而且可能会推广到其他同样面临市场准入障碍的少数民族企业。相对较少的行为者（即自2001年以来的88个部落发行人）长期存在于数据中，这使得对资本获取问题的研究比非部落实体的情况更容易管理。TFIC也可能影响市场本身，因为最近一项关于非部落免税债券的研究发现，信息不对称的“最关键后果”是借贷成本更高，但“缓解信息不对称”可靠地消除了风险溢价，降低了借贷成本，特别是对部落这样的新发行人或不经常发行人。

As separate sovereign governments, Indian tribes, just like state and local governments, have an obligation to improve the lives of their citizens. However, tribal governments are much more limited in their ability to access capital. Many tribal communities are often burdened with extremely low socio-economic factors, including low educational achievement, high unemployment, high poverty, and low per capita income. Upwards of $50 billion of unmet capital needs go unfunded each year in Indian Country, in large part due to impediments to tribal access to the capital markets. There are numerous reasons tribes are at a disadvantage, but one little studied is information asymmetry. Relatively poor market awareness is both a cause of tribal underdevelopment and an impediment to any solution. Because most tribes confront information asymmetries for any debt financing strategy they might consider, an empirical study of successful information sharing and integration strategies for tax-exempt bonds will help identify suitable strategies to induce sharing in other domains where tribes operate at an informational disadvantage.Based on preliminary work (IIS 0534905), this Tribal Finance Information Clearinghouse (TFIC) project will make three unique contributions to information science. First it will collect, aggregate, analyze, and disseminate new digital content consisting of access to market-actionable data on tribal tax-exempt bonds that is not currently available. Second, it will generate data about the factors that impede or induce contributions of private information to a collective information good. (Broadly, insight into how to design information systems that resolve the social dilemmas of information collaboration is an increasingly important.) Finally, the TFIC will be an exercise in informational empowerment. By presenting original financial data as part of a larger infrastructure that includes updated content regarding regulatory, legal, and legislative changes, industry news, and a forum to contribute lessons learned, the TFIC will add significant informational value to transactional data. The TFIC will also support multidisciplinary research on the design and use of information technologies and the resulting impact on government institutions and citizens.Broader ImpactWithout empirical data about tribal interactions with capital markets, many research questions remain unanswerable. With this project, for the first time, these may be answerable as the TFIC will offer researchers and policy-makers an unparalleled opportunity to analyze a complete data set related to a significant minority group and to determine whether information asymmetries, legal regulations, or other variables impact capital markets access for tribes. Not only will the outcomes directly impact Native Americans, but the results may be generalizable to other minority enterprises that also face impeded market access. The relatively small number of actors (i.e., 88 tribal issuers since 2001) with durable presence in the data makes study of capital access questions more manageable than might be the case with non-tribal entities.The TFIC may also impact the marketplace itself, given that a recent study of non-tribal tax-exempt bonds found that the "most critical consequence" of information asymmetry is higher borrowing costs, but that "alleviating information asymmetry" reliably eliminates the risk premium and reduces borrowing costs, particularly for new or infrequent issuers such as tribes.