Bachelor’s and Master’s Theses

The Chair for Microeconomics regularly supervises Bachelor’s and Master’s theses in German and English on a broad range of microeconomic topics and is happy to receive requests from students for supervision. While students are encouraged to suggest topics, we maintain a list of topics (English only) that students may also consider.

We place particular importance on the contact between student and advisor. Students looking for a thesis topic are explicitly encouraged to approach us with any questions, ideas or own suggestions for a thesis topic, and to maintain regular contact with their thesis advisor later, while working on the thesis.

Bachelor’s theses at the chair for Microeconomics will often involve a literature review, replicating a finding from a well-known paper in the literature, or analysing a case study. Previous experience with programming, data analysis, or modelling are generally not required.

Master’s theses at the chair for Microeconomics should typically detail the student’s original analysis of a particular topic and are thus broader and more demanding than Bachelor’s theses. Primarily or entirely qualitative theses are possible, but including analytical or empirical components is encouraged. Experience with programming, modelling, or data analysis can be an advantage, but are not always necessary.

Exposé: After agreeing on a topic with their advisor, students are encouraged to write a short exposé, stating their proposed research question, an outline of the suggested methods, and a preliminary structure of the thesis. Depending on their research question, it can be helpful to include literature or data sources.

Guidelines for writing theses can be found  here.

Methods:

• Calibration of microeconomic Agent-Based Models
• Literature review on price elasticities
• Finding stable patterns in the age distributions of firms

Financial markets:

• The economics of cryptocurrencies, and regulation of cryptocurrencies
• Investigating systemic risk in the Chinese banking system
• Can newspaper articles predict financial market outcomes?
• Causes and mechanisms of endogenous fluctuations in asset prices
• Systemic risk and stability in financial networks

The microeconomics of economic development:

• Technology adoption in a developing country context
• Research and innovation in Eastern European countries after the fall of the Soviet Union
• Economic Complexity in Eastern European transforming economies
• Early international patenting in the first wave of globalisation
• The economic effects of AI on job markets

The economics of technology and innovation:

• Models of technological lock-in inspiried by Arthur (1994)
• Competition between free software-products: Data analysis on browser usage in Wikipedia editing
• Investigating directionality in capability accumulation models
• Analysing technological complexity with the method of Van Dam (2020)
• Analysing green technologies in European patent data