This paper studies manipulation in derivative contract markets. When traders hedge factor risk using derivative contracts, traders can manipulate settlement prices by trading the underlying spot goods. In equilibrium, manipulation can make all agents worse off. The model illustrates how contract market manipulation can be defined in a manner distinct from other forms of strategic trading behavior, and how the structure of contract and spot markets affect the size of manipulation-induced market distortions.

Houses with higher value uncertainty receive less mortgage credit: mortgages backed by these houses are more likely to be rejected, have higher interest rates, and have lower loan-to-price ratios. The relationship between house value uncertainty and credit availability is driven partly by a classic channel in which uncertainty lowers debt recovery rates, and partly by a novel channel where more uncertain appraisals make regulatory constraints on loan size more likely to bind. We build a structural model to quantify the effects of each channel, and show how a shift toward computerized asset appraisals could influence credit access.

We show how to measure the welfare effects arising from increased data availability. When lenders have more data on prospective borrower costs, they can charge prices that are more aligned with these costs. This increases total social welfare and transfers surplus across borrower types. We show that under certain assumptions the magnitudes of these welfare changes can be estimated using only quantity and price data. Applying our methodology to bankruptcy flag removal, we find that in a counterfactual world where bankruptcy flags are never removed from credit reports, previously-bankrupt borrowers’ surplus decreases substantially, whereas efficiency increases only modestly.

Repo markets are an important first stage of monetary policy transmission. In the European repo market, the majority of participants, including non-dealer banks and non-banks, do not have access to centralized trading platforms. Rather, they rely on OTC intermediation by a small number of dealers that exert significant market power. Dealer market power causes the passthrough of the ECB's policy rate to be inefficient and unequal. Allowing market participants access to centralized trading platforms, or a secured deposit facility with the central bank, could improve the transmission efficiency of monetary policy while reducing the dispersion in repo rates across customers.