Theses

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

— Mark Twain

Application for Master's and Bachelor's theses

If you are interested in writing a Master's or Bachelor's thesis in the fields of

• Energy, Commodity, or Climate Finance

• Risk Management

Currently, I offer the following (broad) topics:

• Impact of Investor Sentiment on Volatility

• Climate/Biodiversity Risk and Financial Markets

• Cryptocurency Investors

• Impact of Financial Hedgers on Commodity Markets

Please feel free to send me a short proposal of your thesis. Use the attached proposition template (based on Faff, 2015): Proposition Template (Explanations). More information regarding the proposition template and the idea behind it (pitching research) is available from this web page: http://pitchingresearch.com/. A large catalogue of examples from various topics can be found here.

You can either apply for a proposed topic or suggest your own topic. If you suggest your own topic, I expect you to send me a written summary of the research project with the relevant academic literature and ideas for an empirical study (1-2 pages). We will then discuss the possibility of writing a Master's thesis on your proposed topic.

For the identification of important research in your area of interest, please take a look at papers published in one of the following journals (focus on the A+, A journals):

• For a finance thesis, you should look at: Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Corporate Finance, Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Critical Finance Review, and Annual Review of Financial Economics. 

• Complete list of Journals: VHB Jourqual 4 Finance Ranking

If you completed the template, I am looking forward to meeting you for a discussion of your proposal.

I expect you to aim for a high-quality thesis. The objective should be that your thesis has publication standards similar to a peer-reviewed article in an academic finance journal. To obtain a good grade, I expect your thesis to include a well-grounded empirical study that delivers a novel contribution to existing energy/finance research. For all topics you should be familiar with a statistical software package such as Stata, Matlab, EViews, Python, or R. Excel is not sufficient. The thesis can be written in LaTeX (preferred) or in Word. For LaTeX, have a look at the online TeX IDE Overleaf. I highly recommend using a reference manager, such as Mendeley, to manage your literature.

Please also have a look at the following documents and web pages:

• What is a good research question? (Jacobsen, 2014)

• Valuable writing tips for your thesis: Cochrane (2005), Jacobsen (2015)

• The Academic Phrasebank

• Evaluating research (Edmans, 2021)

• Useful links from Alice Bonaimé

• How to succed in academia or have fun trying from Lasse H. Pedersen

• Preparing a Referee Report: Guidelines and Perspectives by Jonathan Berk, Campbell Harvey, and David Hirshsleifer

Note that theses have to be written in English.

Some useful data sources

• Real-time economic data (with APIs): U.S., ECB, Germany

• Survey Data: NFCS Survey (U.S.), LISS Panel (NL)