The School of Business and Economics strives for good matches between students and supervisors of Master theses. A good match usually requires that the student has attended courses dealing with theoretical models and/or empirical methods relevant for the research question to be addressed in the Master thesis. At the point where you still have the choice of which courses to attend, you should therefore think ahead and choose courses that are likely to be helpful for your Master thesis.

As regards potential supervision by members of our Department, good matches would seem likely for topics in personnel and organization economics. If you want to find out more about our current fields of research, please follow this link. From time to time, we will announce potential topics for Master theses at our Department, but at any time you are free to suggest a topic you would be interested in working on. We predominantely offer empirical Master theses where students work with datasets. We have access to different datasets such as sports data or representative household data. Students can also retrieve data from specialised databases, e.g. EIKON or Orbis, for which they can request access via our Wiwi-IT (for an overview of the databases and information on access click here). We also supervise Master theses in cooperation with companies – however, the research question should ideally be investigated quantitatively (e.g., analyzing archival or survey data provided by the companies). In case that own datasets are generated within the scope of the thesis, those should subsequently be made available to the Department.

Suggestions for a Master thesis (non-exhaustive list):

with data from the chair:

• Empirical research using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Many different topics are possible such as discrimination, personality, gender, pay, performance, Covid, twin-studies and many more
   
• Empirical research using The German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA). Many different topics are possible such as  gender ideologies, work-family conflicts, personal relations, care, income and household decisions and many more
   
• Market discrimination and the role of information – such as ethnicity, gender, social media, personality, or other
   
• Empirical research in sports economics (e.g. home advantage, referee bias and many more)
   
• Analyzing data on executive compensation in Germany (e.g. gender pay gap, pay for performance sensitivity, etc.)
   
• Empirical research in economics of education. Many topics are possible, e.g., inequality, gender, educational policies, and/or contextual factors of student performance
   
• Own topic suggestions are always welcomed and appreciated
   
• ...

without data from the chair (data available in specialised databases):

• Corporate social responsibility (CSR). Many topics are possible (e.g. executive compensation and CSR, the effect of board characteristics on CSR or the relation of CSR and firm financial performance)
   
• Effects of artificial intelligence in HRM
   
• Own topic suggestions are always welcomed and appreciated
   
• ...

The School of Business and Economics runs a common mechanism for Master thesis registration aiming at good matches in line with student preferences. If you want to write your Master thesis with us, please fill out the short survey on ILIAS administered by the student dean’s office and state Prof. Pull as first preference.

Please use the free text commentary field to indicate your preferences regarding the topic of your Master thesis. Please also indicate whether you would like to work with data (some of the topics announced by the department may require empirical work) or whether you prefer to write a Master thesis that is based on existing literature.

The survey asks about which modules you have already taken, your grades and the work unit you would like to be supervised by. Filling out the survey only takes about 5 minutes, but please be careful as you cannot change your answers once you have provided them.

Please make sure you have your transcript of your Bachelor degree ready as you will need to upload this along with your current transcript to complete your registration. Note that you need to have earned a minimum of 30 ECTS in your M.Sc. degree in order to register for the Master thesis. All of the information you provide will, of course, be treated confidentially. Only the conductor of the survey and the academic staff will have access to your information.

Subsequent to your registration, we will have a close look at your application, see if we can supervise your Master thesis, and get back to you in due course.

Starting with the following semester (i.e., beginning of October or beginning of April, respectively) we will contact you with details on who will be your contact person at the chair and how to proceed. For those students who write their Master thesis during the winter term, the (latest) starting date for the Master thesis is November, 15^th, and for those writing their Master thesis during the summer term, the (latest) starting date for the Master thesis is May, 15^th. About two months later (i.e. mid-January or mid-July, respectively), there is a joint colloquium with all the Master students who currently write their Master thesis under the supervision of the chair presenting the current state of their research. The exact dates are announced at the beginning of the semester.