Research

Work in Progress

“The American `Reparations' That Weren't” (Draft Available by July 2025)

Stephen Schuker's provocative thesis that Weimar Germany extracted net "reparations" from the foreign powers totaling 2.1% of national income from 1919 to 1931 largely funded by exuberant American investors fundamentally reshaped historiographical debates about interwar financial burdens. However, disaggregating his calculations reveals critical inconsistencies: reasonable net foreign resource transfers for 1924-1931 averaged only 0.6% of Gross National Income(GNI), implying that achieving Schuker's figure requires annual inflows of 4% during the hyperinflation years (1919-1923) - an implausible magnitude given monetary chaos and capital flight. While Schuker correctly challenged exaggerated accounts of reparations' burden by demonstrating significant capital inflows during the Dawes years, his quantitative overreach obscures a more nuanced reality: Germany temporarily benefited from international capital inflow (1924-1929) without fundamentally reversing its debtor position. The corrected figures suggest Germany occupied neither the Keynesian victim status of traditional reparations historiography nor the privileged position Schuker claims, but rather a dependence wherein reparations absorbed approximately 70% of cumulative foreign capital inflows, creating a fragile intermediation that collapsed catastrophically when credit markets reversed.

Questionable Research Ideas:

Here is a list of bad economics research ideas I have from brain-fuzz and drawing from daily inspirations from random encounters of papers: they are often challenging, undesirable, and difficult to research but nonetheless interesting. If you are an economics or economic history researcher: you would be more than welcome to take look! 

If you spot potential in any of these ideas - perhaps you know of relevant datasets, can suggest improved empirical strategies, or see ways to make them more feasible - I'd love to hear from you. I'm also open to potential collaboration. Feel free to reach out at sihao.feng@stcatz.ox.ac.uk

Curating Alpha: The Predictive Power of Institutional Narratives in the Art Market

Asset pricing paradigms struggle where value is socially constructed, as in the art market, relying on expert narratives rather than discernible cash flows. This paper pioneers an approach to empirically capture these narratives, testing whether the quantifiable dynamics of institutional validation predict long-run art market returns. We move beyond standard financial data to construct unique, century-long time-series indices reflecting shifts in expert consensus. These indices codify the evolving endorsement from key arbiters of taste—museum acquisitions, major exhibitions, and scholarly attention—across granular art categories. The central hypothesis posits that lagged changes in these publicly visible, yet costly-to-process, signals of institutional legitimacy act as a latent factor, predicting future price appreciation distinct from standard risk exposures or price-based momentum effects. We investigate if the slow diffusion and interpretation of this qualitative, expert-driven information create systematic return predictability in this notoriously heterogeneous, illiquid market with limited arbitrage. Operationalizing institutional narratives into predictive signals allows a rigorous test of how subjective expert validation influences asset prices. We examine if the slow incorporation of these quantifiable public signals generates return predictability distinct from known factors, providing insights into price formation and market efficiency for assets reliant on qualitative assessment.

St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford