Research
M.Phil. Thesis
The literature has long taken the inflation, the revaluation settlement, the Brüning cabinet, and the burden of reparations transfers to be linked aspects of one Weimar predicament, though the closure of the Reich's long-term domestic bond market that mediated between them has been described more often than reconstructed. This chapter dates that closure to the revaluation statute of 16 July 1925, which fixed government bondholder recoveries at roughly 2.5% of face value and left the market for unsecured Reich paper foreclosed on any terms a Reichstag majority would carry. Across five recovery years, the Finance Ministry sustained its structural deficit through cash credits classified outside the ordinary budget, captive public-sector lenders, and foreign bridges at punitive rates — corrected-accounts reconstruction placing concealed deficits at 10–12% of expenditure from 1928/29. The arrangement reached its political limit on 26 July 1930, when the omnibus decree imposed, for the first time in the Republic's history, a budget the parliamentary majority would not vote.
Banking failures are central to accounts of Weimar's economic collapse, yet the proposition that the destruction of specific bank relationships transmitted distress to firms has not been tested at the firm level. This chapter builds that test from a new panel of roughly 6,000 industrial joint-stock firms drawn from the Handbuch der Deutschen Aktien-Gesellschaften and linked to their paying-agent banks before the crisis. The empirical setting rests on a historically informed comparison: the Darmstädter und Nationalbank (Danat) and Dresdner Bank were comparably fragile and, on Schnabel's balance-sheet classification, both insolvent in July 1931, yet the cabinet closed Danat publicly while quietly recapitalising Dresdner under the same bank holiday. Firms attached to Danat faced distress probabilities approximately 4.5 percentage points above otherwise comparable firms in the year after Danat's public closure and exclusion from clearing; clients of Dresdner show no comparable increase. The damage that ran through bank-firm relationships was concentrated and policy-dependent rather than informational, though modest in aggregate — roughly 5% of observed corporate distress — because the systemic forces that engulfed every firm operated through channels no firm-level identification can isolate.
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. Reach out at sihao dot feng at stcatz dot ox dot ac dot uk.
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. The paper documents preliminary patterns that may speak to broader questions about price formation under substantial uncertainty, although I remain agnostic about the specific equilibrium mechanism at work.
