The topic of your master thesis must be 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, optimal income taxation, etc. I am also interested in the political economy aspects surrounding these topics.
Please note that I do not supervise entirely empirical or entirely theoretical master theses. A good master thesis in my personal view should combine some empirical data work with theory. I encourage the students to work with micro data sets in order to motivate their research. We teach you how to do it in a set of advanced Master courses here in Bonn (including my Public Econ class and Research module on Inequality).
To help you find the 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 of 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.
I also expect the students to build simple structural models (that we also teach in different courses here in Bonn) and then apply their theoretical frameworks to evaluate the economic consequences of policy reform (e.g. health care reform).
Your grade does not depend on how many times we met during 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 here. I will send you a Zoom link shortly before the meeting or offer you to meet in person, whichever you like most.
Please send me your Matlab codes per email at the same time when you submit your thesis to the exam office. Will I look into your codes? I might or I might not. But sometimes the quantitative results in your thesis may go wrong. Your codes are there to actually help me better understand the source of a potential mistake in your computations. So I will look into your codes if I notice that something went wrong. And this is for your own benefit! Sometimes the results are wrong due to very small typos. If this is the case, I will not downgrade your work too much, so please make it easier for me to identify those typos!
Please try to organize your codes, so that they are easy to read and understand. Here are some ideas for how to prepare your codes:
1) Send your codes as one .zip file (not .rar, as I cannot open them on my Mac).
2) If you have more than one .m files, please provide a brief codebook, i.e. a text file (.txt) with a brief explanation in which order the files must be executed. Indicate clearly which files are functions and which files are main files.
3) Do not attach any .mat files, any figures, .doc files, etc. Please send only .m files together with any other input files which are necessary to execute the codes. Even if your code needs a .mat file as an input, do not send it to me but instead provide me with the code which generates the necessary .mat file. Make sure to point this out in the codebook.
4) Do not attach any code files and remove any pieces of code that generate results or variables unused in your thesis.
5) Briefly comment on your codes. You do not need to comment each line but you need to identify blocks of your code by task and comment on each block. Please make sure to point out what a given part of the code aims to achieve. Which figure or table in the thesis does a given code block produce?
6) All paths in the codes must be written relative to the main folder that you send me. Please do NOT use absolute paths, as this will result in error messages when I run the codes on my computer. For example, suppose your code is located in folder “code” and the input data file is in subfolder “data”. The absolute path to the input file would look like “/username/thesis/code/data/input_data.txt”. Instead of this path, simply use a relative path: “data/input_data.txt”.
7) If you have used microdata or any other data to generate figures or tables, you need to send me the codes (e.g. Stata code) following the same principles described above for the Matlab codes. Also, make sure to attach the source file with the data (unless it is a restricted data set). If the source file is too large, please send me a Dropbox or GoogleDrive link to the .zip file with the data.
If you borrowed the codes from an external source, this is fine. However, you have to clearly and visibly indicate this in the main body of your master thesis.
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions!
The topics of some of the master theses that I supervised in the past:
- Wealth Inequality and Inheritance Taxation in Germany
- Optimal Progressivity of the German Pension System
- Old-Age Poverty and Pension Reform in Germany
- Distributional Consequences of Social Security Reform
- Population Aging and Optimal Income Taxation in Japan