Searching for a Research Topic?
Topics are like life-partners. You select a bad one, and you will repent for long. Bad selection apart, researchers sometimes go blank, especially young researchers. To generate a list of ideas, my suggestion is to first ask yourself about the broader area of your interest, such as dividend policy, firms performance, capital structure, cash management, working capital management, stock market volatility, risk-return relationship, returns predictability, lead-lag relationship between groups of stocks, etc.
The second step involves searching for papers in these areas. The easiest way is to search keywords in the broader area in http://scholar.google.com.pk/ . The third step is to quickly read the titles of the papers and note down those which catch your fancy. Making a list of 25-30 papers and discussing them with your teachers, friends, and your supervisor is the fourth step. This way you can easily narrow down to those specific topics which have readily available data and are acceptable to both you and your supervisor.
If you are totally blank even about broader areas, then go through the following lists of paper titles and their abstracts. However, these papers are necessarily high quality papers and involves techniques which are usually beyond the comprehension of MBA/BBA students. For this reason, I have also uploaded research papers from conferences which are not that rigorous in nature, but still can provide you with ideas of topic selection and application of basic statistical tools.
RESEARCH TOPICS