Thesis Supervision

[IMPORTANT!] I intentionally left one typo below. Please read through and find the typo. If you contact me with mentioning the typo, I will pay more attention to you!

I am supervising Bachelor’s and Master’s theses on topics in microtheory-based public economics and political economy, broadly defined. I conduct lab experiments for my research, but typically I do not recommend students to do that. (However, if you come up with a really interesting one, I may fund your project.)

A desirable way of approaching me

Try to answer the following questions before you contact me. It must help you to organize your thoughts.

1. What is your research question? (This should be a sentence that ends with a question mark, so wrong answers are, for example, “I am interested in X and Y,” or “previous papers did this and that, and I want to extend them slightly.” Sometimes excellent questions, for example, “How can we stop climate change efficiently?”, are too big to answer in your thesis. Try to come up with a small, tangible question.)

2. Which method do you consider answering your research question? “ (Wrong answer: “I like theory, so I want to have some theoretical parts in my thesis.”)

I prefer having an online meeting over writing emails back and forth. A rule of thumb: If your email would have three or more paragraphs, or three or more question marks, schedule an appointment.

A typical procedure

1. Contact me at least several weeks before your planned start date: Once you fill out the registration form, you will officially have eight weeks to write a thesis from that date. Typically, students talk to their supervisor way before the official start date to have a sufficiently long time.

2. Most students end up writing a thesis with some empirical data. If you plan to do some empirical work, check the existing data you can browse. Pick some papers you want to begin with. The authors must have described which dataset they used. (If they use confidential data, forget it.) In many cases, the authors even provide supplementary materials, including the dataset. The other way is to start with the existing data you are familiar with. After having a concrete idea about the dataset, you could ask yourself, “with this dataset, what kind of research questions can I answer?” For example, using this way, one former student initially planned to write a public choice theory paper but eventually wrote a paper about American football because he was so familiar with the detailed football dataset. (If you plan to write a theory paper or conduct a survey or an experiment, talk to me. I don’t take “a detailed literature review on XYZ” as a thesis topic.)

3. Once you fill out the registration form [Download], then you have eight weeks.

4. Refer to the guidelines [HERE] and [HERE]. Academic writing is very different from casual writing, so you should expect much time for polising your writing.

5. At least three weeks before the submission deadline, send me a draft so that I can give you feedback.

6. By the submission deadline, you submit two copies of your thesis, one for me and the other one to the student service.

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