Dr. Nicole Moran

Dr. Moran provides financial and economic analysis in complex commercial litigation and regulatory proceedings. She supports experts in preparing for deposition and trial testimony. Her experience spans several industries, including energy, agriculture, FX, consumer lending, and electronics. Dr. Moran has a leading role in Cornerstone Research’s research on cryptocurrency exchanges, derivative contracts and initial coin offerings. Her case experience includes arbitration, regulatory investigations, market manipulation, antitrust, consumer finance, and financial institutions.

Dr. Moran focuses emphasis is on derivative markets for both exchange-traded and over-the-counter products that involve trading activity, order book data, and evaluation of market design that affect market participant behavior. She has extensive experience working with a variety of different types of large, complex transactional datasets from financial institutions. On behalf of clients, she has appeared before enforcement staffs at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

In cases related to market manipulation and antitrust, Dr. Moran has:

Analyzed trading in foreign exchange products by one of the top foreign exchange broker-dealers facing multinational investigations of collusion and manipulation of foreign exchange markets
Analyzed trading in interest rate derivatives by a major multinational bank under investigation in several countries for possible manipulation of LIBOR and similar financial benchmarks
On behalf of numerous crude oil trading companies, analyzed physical and financial product trading activity in response to government trading investigation
On behalf of a futures exchange, investigated trading and positions in response to a government investigation
On behalf of a large food company, investigated purchasing, production, and hedging behavior in response to government and civil proceedings
On behalf of a joint defense, investigated price-fixing allegations for indirect purchasers of optical disk drives
Analyzed valuation of municipal bonds
Analyzed and developed rebuttal arguments regarding antitrust claims and market manipulation claims brought in civil cases
Dr. Moran leads the firm’s research related to analysis of U.S. natural gas transactions from FERC Form 552 submissions. She has published chapters in various books, including “Agriculture” in Commodities: Markets, Performance, and Strategies, Oxford University Press and “Bubbles, Food Prices, and Speculation: Evidence from the CFTC’s Daily Large Trader Data Files” in The Economics of Food Price Volatility, University of Chicago Press. Her research has also been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Futures and the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics.

Prior to joining Cornerstone Research, Dr. Moran was a research economist at the CTFC, where she conducted statistical and econometric analyses on derivative markets and agricultural futures.