About
I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt in the Department of Management and Microeconomics. At the same institution, I was awarded my PhD with the highest distinction (summa cum laude) in 2023. My research focuses on the intersection of Economic/Financial History, Political Economy, and Business Informatics. It aims to increase the understanding of current economic phenomena by analyzing historical events using the latest statistical methods and (partly self-developed) AI-based technologies. Moreover, I visited the Paris School of Economics (PSE) during a research stay in 2023 and was awarded research grants by the DFG (as part of the InfPP SPP 2431), the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the FAZIT Stiftung. For more detailed information on my background, please refer to my CV.
Research
Publications
Design and Implementation of a Historical German Firm-level Financial Database
w/ Dennis Gram, Pantelis Karapanagiotis, Uwe Walz | Journal of Data and Information Quality 14(3)
Broad, long-term financial, and economic datasets are scarce resources, particularly in the European context. In this article, we present an approach for an extensible data model that is adaptable to future changes in technologies and sources. This model may constitute a basis for digitized and structured long-term historical datasets for different jurisdictions and periods. The data model covers the specific peculiarities of historical financial and economic data and is flexible enough to reach out for data of different types (quantitative as well as qualitative) from different historical sources, hence, achieving extensibility. Furthermore, we outline a relational implementation of this approach based on historical German firm and stock market data from 1920 to 1932.
Working Papers
Terrorism and Voting: The Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Germany
w/ Navid Sabet, Guido Friebel | CEPR Discussion Paper 10653 | Conditional Accept @ AEJ: Economic Policy
We document that right-wing terrorism leads to significant increases in the vote share for the right-wing, populist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party in Germany. To identify causal effects, we exploit quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across municipalities. Using the SOEP, a longitudinal panel of individuals, we find successful terror leads individuals to prefer the AfD more and worry more about migration. Political parties - the AfD in particular - adjust their messaging in election manifestos in response to terror. Overall, and in contrast to previous work, we find terrorism is consequential to the rise of right-wing populism in a Western, multi-party democratic system.
The Shadows of a Shattered Economy: How Persistent are Increases in Extremist Voting?
Working Paper
Economic shocks can trigger sharp increases in extremist voting (e.g., de Bromhead et al., 2013, Margalit, 2019). However, is the rise in extremist voting persistent over time or rather short-lived? I answer this question by exploiting geographic variation in the exposure to an economic crisis in interwar Germany while utilizing the exceptionally high number of Federal elections during this period. I show that having suffered from the economic collapse unfolding in the wake of the 1923 Ruhr Occupations caused a short-term six-percentage-point increase in left-wing extremist voting that vanished within half a year. I further document that repeated exposure to economic shocks leads to a anew overproportional increase in the support of extremist parties. To counteract endogeneity problems, I rely on Synthetic Control Groups for statistical inferencing.
Entity Matching with Similarity Encoding: A Supervised Learning Recommendation Framework for Linking (Big) Data
In this study, we introduce a novel entity matching (EM) framework. It combines state-of-the-art EM approaches based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with a new similarity encoding derived from matching techniques that are prevalent in finance and economics. Our framework is on-par or outperforms alternative end-to-end frameworks in standard benchmark cases. Because similarity encoding is constructed using (edit) distances instead of semantic similarities, it avoids out-of-vocabulary problems when matching dirty data. We highlight this property by applying an EM application to dirty financial firm-level data extracted from historical archives.
Tracing Modern Mainstream Economics (1948-2010): The Samuelson-Nordhaus Legacy Analyzed Through Natural Language Processing
w/ Rainer Klump, Anselm Küsters, Ingo Sauer | Working Paper | R&R @ JITE
We examine shifts in the importance and connotation of focal economics concepts over the second half of the 20th century. Our study relies on quantitative text and sentiment analyses of the 19 editions of Paul A. Samuelson’s textbook Economics. Its longivity and its global commercial success have made it a valuable source for detecting long-term developments of mainstream economic knowledge. Our paper complements existing qualitative and cross-sectional quantitative studies on Economics with a time series perspective. We can generally confirm findings from earlier qualitative research but give them a quantifiable and thus more precise meaning.
Other Work in Progress
- The Reign of the Great Banks: Financial Development and Firms' Real Economic Activity in Imperial Germany (w/ David Heller)
- "Free Money", Merger, and Firms' Incentive to Perform: Insights from the German Hyperinflation (w/ Pantelis Karapanagiotis and Uwe Walz).
- Is the Linear Model of Innovation Actually Dead? A 'Topic-Sentiment Analysis' of Policy Documents (w/ Leo Leitzinger and Thanos Fragkandreas)
- Riding the Inflation Wave: The Role of Fixed Assets in Firms' Post-Inflation Performance (w/ Dennis Gram and Uwe Walz)
Other Publications
- Wirtschaft, Geschichte und Künstliche Intelligenz? (rer.pol., 2022, Link)
- Terrorism and voting: The rise of right-wing populism in Germany (VOXEU Column Politics and Economics, 2023, Link)
- An Extensible Model for Historical Financial Data with an Application to German Company and Stock Market Data (Proceedings of the ICTeSSH 2021 conference, w/ Dennis Gram, Pantelis Karapanagiotis, Jan Krzyzanowski, and Uwe Walz, Link)
Teaching
Lectures
- Business Plan: Conception and Planing (Wayss & Freytag Management Program), Goethe Business School
Winter 2024
- Introduction to Economics, ProCredit Academy
Spring 2024
- Microeconomics I (B.Sc., Guest Lecturer), Goethe University
Winter 2022, 2024
Cobb-Douglas Utility Function Illustration
- Advanced Microeconomic Theory (Ph.D., TA), Goethe University
Summer 2023, 2024
- Industrial Organization and Strategic Competition (B.Sc., TA), Goethe University
Summer 2020, 2021, 2022
- Economics of Digitalization (B.Sc., TA), Goethe University (Seminar)
Winter 2020, 2021, 2022
- Microeconomics I (B.Sc., TA), Goethe University
Winter 2018, 2019
Theses Supervision
I primarily supervise theses, focusing on topics that align closely with my research areas. If you're interested in writing your Bachelor's or Master's thesis on a related subject but weren't assigned to our chair through QIS-LSF, please don't hesitate to email me. If you have queries about the regulatory procedures, please refer to this page for Bachelor's theses and that link for Master's theses. Below, you find a selection of theses I have supervised in the past:
- Reasons for the German Hyperinflation 1923: A Comparison of Balance of Payments and Quantity Theory Arguments
- Real Estate and Inflation
- What are the Economic Consequences of Ethnic Discrimination Exemplified by "Aryanizations" in Germany?
- Right-Wing Populist Reactions in Social Networks to Terror Attacks
Contact
Dr. Marius Liebald
Theodor-W.-Adorno Platz 4
Room 4.230 (RuW)
60323 Frankfurt a.M.
Germany
Email: liebald@econ.uni-frankfurt.de
Phone: +49 (0)69 798 34819