Research
M.Phil. Thesis
Borrowed Time: Finance and Crisis in Weimar Germany. M.Phil. in Economic and Social History, University of Oxford, 2026.
Weimar Germany's fiscal crisis of 1930 and banking crisis of 1931 are usually told as separate stories. This thesis argues that both grew out of the same damaged credit market. After 1925 the Reich could no longer sell long-term bonds at home and lived on short-term paper instead. That weakness narrowed Chancellor Brüning's room for manoeuvre before he took office, and it shaped both his decree budget of 1930 and the bank rescue of 1931.
The fiscal constraint that ended parliamentary budgeting in Weimar Germany was fixed in 1925, earlier than the long debate over wages and reparations has placed it. By settling with the Reich's own bondholders at a small fraction of face value, the revaluation statute closed the domestic market for long-term Reich bonds. The Finance Ministry then covered its deficits with short-term paper the published budget did not show. When short-term credit dried up in 1929, no Reichstag majority would vote the taxes to replace it, and in July 1930 Chancellor Brüning imposed the budget by decree.
In July 1931 the cabinet chose which of two insolvent banks would fail. The Darmstädter und Nationalbank (Danat) and the Dresdner Bank were equally weak on paper. The cabinet closed Danat by name and kept Dresdner open on the strength of Dresdner's own unaudited assurance that it could pay. That assurance collapsed within two days, and the state rescued Dresdner anyway, paying in treasury notes, because cooperative banks and town treasuries depended on it. Danat served industry, and industry was the client the cabinet could afford to abandon.
This chapter is under revision. I hope to post it soon as a working paper, together with the code and data to replicate it.
Questionable Research Ideas
A list of bad economics research ideas drawn from brain-fuzz and daily encounters with papers. They are challenging, undesirable, and difficult to research, but nonetheless interesting. If you are an economics or economic history researcher and see potential in any of these, whether you know of relevant datasets, can suggest sharper empirical strategies, or see ways to make them feasible, I'd love to hear from you, and I'm open to collaboration.
How does qualitative, socially produced information enter prices in markets characterized by extreme heterogeneity, illiquidity, and limited arbitrage? This very preliminary and speculative project approaches the question empirically by constructing original time-series indices that track the evolving endorsement of art categories by institutional arbiters of the art world such as museums, exhibition organizers, and scholars over the past century in the North American and European context. The central exercise investigates whether observable shifts in this institutional attention precede movements in category-level art prices, consistent with slow information diffusion in a market where fundamental value is contested and processing costs are high.
