Theses can be written in either German or English, regardless of the language in which the proposals are described here. You are welcome to discuss your own ideas with us. Are you interested? Contact Prof. Löffler or one of his assistants.

Proposals

Proposals for Master's theses
Proposals for Bachelor's theses

Guidelines

We provide some Guidelines for writing a seminar paper or a thesis and for giving presentations

Links and hints for literature searches

• ECONLIT (search within economic (incl. finance) journals)
• ssrn.com (search for working papers posted on SSRN. Most finance researchers post their papers on SSRN)
• Scholar.Google (It's in particular great for finding papers that cite a specific paper, or for quickly getting links to full-texts, but you shouldn't use it as your only way to search the literature. One pitfall is that a new paper that has not been cited yet may not show up at the top of the results even though you search for words that describe the paper well, and better than the papers that are placed ahead of it.)
• Directory of journals with information on online access. (Search for journals and you get information on whether they are available online and if so, where (e.g. through EBSCO))
• Using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity can be a useful way to obtain an initial overview of relevant literature. Since both published papers and working papers can vary considerably in quality, it may be helpful to ask for papers published in highly ranked journals. For working papers, it can also be useful to ask the AI tool to identify papers written by researchers who regularly publish in highly ranked journals. This lowers the probability that AI suggests low-quality papers that are not really worth looking at.
• Use a multi-layered approach to literature searches. For example, try to identify a recent working paper closely related to your topic and examine the papers referenced in it. Also try to identify important published papers closely related to your topic and look at more recent studies that cite the published papers you have identified. If a researcher is particularly active in the area relevant to your topic, it can also be useful to consult their homepage for current working papers.

Data and Software

see our information here.