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Provides information on using the Microsoft business information tools to perform analysis and reporting using Excel and SharePoint.

The rise of financial technology (fintech) has the potential to provide better-quality financial services to more people. Although these enhanced financial services have arisen in order to meet consumer need, their regulatory status threatens that progress. Many fintech firms are regulated on a state-by-state basis even though their transactions are interstate, and they compete with firms that enjoy more consistent rules through federal preemption. This dynamic can harm efficiency, competitive equity, and political equity. This Article examines developments in marketplace lending, money transmission, and online sales of securities in an attempt to identify situations in which greater federalization of the rules may be justified. It also considers a situation in which the federal government should abstain from intervening, even if it has the right to do so. Whether the states or federal government should take the lead in regulating fintech is an emerging and important question whose answer will affect the financial lives of consumers and investors. This Article seeks to begin a conversation about how to determine whether federalism or federalization is appropriate.

This paper investigates the role of proposal power in the allocation of transportation projects across U.S. congressional districts in 1991 and 1998. The evidence supports the key qualitative prediction of legislative bargaining models: members with proposal power -- those sitting on the transportation authorization committee -- secure more project spending for their districts than do other representatives. Support for the quantitative restrictions on the value of proposal power is more mixed. I then empirically address several alternative models of legislative behavior, including partisan models, informational roles for committees, models with appropriations committees, and theories of committees as preference outliers.

Contrary to simple theoretical predictions, existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending. A legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods; this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd-out. To correct for such endogeneity, the model motivates instruments based on the political power of state congressional delegations. Exploiting this exogenous variation in grants, the instrumental variables estimator reports crowd-out that is statistically and economically significant. This endogeneity may explain the flypaper effect, a nonequivalence between grant receipts and private income.

"While representation in the U.S. House is based upon state population, each state has an equal number (two) of U.S. Senators. Thus, relative to the state delegations in the U.S. House, small population states are provided disproportionate bargaining power in the U.S. Senate. This paper provides new evidence on the role of this small state bargaining power in the distribution of federal funds using data on projects earmarked in appropriations bills between 1995 and 2003. Relative to earmarks secured in House appropriations bills, Senate earmarks exhibit a small state advantage that is both economically and statistically significant. The paper also examines two theoretically-motivated channels through which this small state advantage operates: increased proposal power through appropriations committee representation and the lower cost of securing votes due to smaller federal tax shares. Taken together, these two channels explain over 80 percent of the measured small state bias. Finally, a welfare analysis demonstrates the inefficiency of the measured small state bias"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site