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

HCC：数字部落政府：部落财务信息交换所 (TFIC)

• 批准号: 0902426
• 负责人: Gavin Clarkson
• 金额: $ 38.62万
• 依托单位: University of Houston
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0902426&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: HCC; Digital; Tribal; Government; Finance

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.

作为独立的主权政府，印度部落，就像邦和地方政府一样，有义务改善其公民的生活。然而，部落政府在获得资本方面的能力要有限得多。许多部落社区往往背负着极低的社会经济因素的负担，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500亿美元的未得到满足的资本需求得不到资金支持，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，但对信息不对称的研究很少。相对较低的市场意识既是部落不发达的原因，也是任何解决办法的障碍。由于大多数部落在他们可能考虑的任何债务融资策略上都面临信息不对称，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找到合适的策略，在部落处于信息劣势的其他领域促进共享。基于前期工作(IIS 0534905)，这个部落金融信息交换所项目将对信息科学做出三项独特的贡献。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部落免税债券的市场可操作数据。其次，它将生成有关阻碍或诱导私人信息对集体信息商品的贡献的因素的数据。(总的来说，洞察如何设计信息系统以解决信息协作的社会困境越来越重要。)最后，TFIC将是信息赋权的一次练习。通过将原始财务数据作为更大基础设施的一部分呈现出来，该基础设施包括有关监管、法律和立法变化的最新内容、行业新闻以及一个提供经验教训的论坛，TFIC将为交易数据增加显著的信息价值。TFIC还将支持关于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。广泛影响由于没有关于部落与资本市场相互作用的经验数据，许多研究问题仍然无法回答。有了这个项目，这些问题可能第一次得到回答，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影响部落的资本市场准入。这些结果不仅会直接影响美洲原住民，而且可能会推广到其他同样面临市场准入障碍的少数族裔企业。数据中持续存在的参与者数量相对较少(即自2001年以来有88个部落发行人)，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还可能影响市场本身，因为最近一项对非部落免税债券的研究发现，信息不对称的“最严重后果”是更高的借贷成本，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，特别是对部落等新的或不频繁的发行人来说。