If you are a bachelor student and you are interested in writing your bachelor thesis with me, please read the instructions below!
The topic of your bachelor thesis must be somehow related to my research interests - public economics or social welfare economics.
Examples of topics: public and private pension systems, educational programs, welfare programs and income redistribution, health care, etc. I am also interested in political economy aspects surrounding these programs.
Please write me an email (see section Contact) to inquire whether I have time to supervise you. Please include in your email:
one of the topics you want to write the thesis on;
time frame when you intend to complete the thesis;
your transcript of records so that I can see which courses you have taken.
Once I confirm that I can supervise your bachelor thesis, you need to come up with a research question. In order to do so, please do the literature search on your topic:
You can use Google Scholar, Sciencedirect (choose Advanced Search) or IDEAS to find scientific papers on your topic. To narrow down your search, focus only on those papers that are already published. To further narrow down your search, look at those articles that are published in "good" economic journals. To get an idea over what a good journal is, look here (restrict your attention to the top 50-70 journals, but this is of course arbitrary).
Find 2-3 published papers (i.e. not working papers) that you find interesting.
If you cannot find a research question, don't worry. I will help you. But please find several papers about the topic that interests YOU! We can figure out a research question together within the range of the papers that you picked.
After you found the papers, write me an email and suggest 2-3 time slots for a meeting (preferably in the afternoon). Don't forget to attach these papers.
We will arrange for a meeting and discuss the papers in more detail and finalize your topic. My office is at Kaiserplatz (Deutsche Bank building, 4th floor, Room 4.014).
After we finalized the title of your thesis, you are expected to register your thesis with the exam office within one week. This is in your own interest because it is simply inefficient to spend too much of your time on the thesis.
I do not assign grades based on how many times we met during my office hours. So don't feel obliged to sign up for office hours if you don't have any questions. If you do have a question, please sign up for office hours here. I will send you a Zoom link shortly before the meeting or offer you to meet in person, whichever you like most.
In any case, it would be very useful if you sent me per email a rough outline of your thesis before you actually start writing the thesis. For example:
Chapter 1 (ca. 3 pages) : overview over current political and academic debate on the topic
Chapter 2 (ca. 4 pages) : description of the theoretical framework from paper X.
...
Take a look at this nice guide for students on writing (in German only).
Some of the topics I have supervised recently:
Die optimale Besteuerung von Ehepaaren.
Bevölkerungsalterung und Rentensystem in Deutschland.
Überqualifizierung am Arbeitsmarkt.
Optimale Besteuerung der Spitzenverdiener
Einkommensteuerhinterziehung: Theorie und empirische Evidenz
Die Wirkung von Kreditrestriktionen auf die privaten Bildungsinvestitionen
Auswirkungen von Erbschaften auf die Vermögensakkumulation
etc