Research
M.Phil. Thesis
Chapter 1. Borrowed Time: The Fiscal Origins of the German Depression
The conventional historiography traces Germany's Great Depression to the withdrawal of American capital and Brüning's deflationary response. This chapter traces the fiscal crisis to a domestic origin that predated both. The hyperinflation of 1921–1923 liquidated 154 billion marks in domestic war debt, the largest peacetime expropriation of private creditors in modern European history, and the Revaluation Law of 1925 sealed it by compensating government bondholders at a miserly 2.5% of face value. The domestic sovereign bond market never recovered, yet equities and mortgage investment did, proof that the damage was specific to creditor trust in the state. With long-term borrowing foreclosed, the Reich relied on short-term treasury bills, captive lending from public enterprises, and foreign borrowing at punitive rates, producing structural deficits of 10% to 20% of expenditure by 1928/29 that were concealed through accounting manipulations. When the Depression arrived, the fiscal room for manoeuvre had already been destroyed.
Chapter 2. Every Man for Himself: Bank Failure, Resolution, and Firm Distress in 1931
Banking failures are central to accounts of Weimar Germany's economic collapse, yet the proposition that the destruction of specific bank relationships transmitted distress to firms has never been tested at the firm level. This chapter constructs the first such test, linking approximately 2,900 industrial firms to their pre-crisis banks through paying-agent relationships recorded in the Handbuch der Deutschen Aktien-Gesellschaften and extracted via large language models. Clients of the failed Darmstädter und Nationalbank faced distress rates about 4.5 percentage points above comparable firms, roughly a two-thirds increase on the 7% baseline, while clients of Dresdner Bank, equally insolvent but recapitalised, show no elevated distress. The differential ties the extra distress to the political decision to close Danat publicly and exclude it from clearing.
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 dot feng at stcatz dot ox dot ac dot uk
Institutional Narratives in the Art Market
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.
