Thesis and Dissertation Ideas for Undergrads Master Students in Finance or Economics

A problem I had while doing my master's was finding a suitable thesis for my dissertation. The combination of naivety as well as ambition made it almost impossible for me, at least at the time, to find something appropriate. On one hand, I wanted to do something that has value and not just a slap-on piece of triviality. After all, a thesis is a piece of work that would carry my name into permanence; something that will forever be linked to my brand. However, on the other hand, in both American and British systems (in economics and finance specifically), the thesis usually entail only a fraction of a term's course load. Back then, as a non-research student, I simply didn't have the time nor the experience to dedicate as much attention to my capstone projects. In hind sight, there were so many things I could have done to make my thesis better. As a public service :), I thought I'd spend some time writing some guidelines about writing a thesis for the non-PhD degree student (which I'll put into another post), as well as some specific research ideas for students in economics and finance (which I'll put here, I'll try to update this list as I think of more topics).

Ideas for economics:

Estimate studies on implementable policy. Say the region around your school is considering a project (implement a sales tax, legalize gambling, ban guns, etc.), you can review the existing literature on these specific topics and as innovation use the estimates presented in the studies to predict the consequences of this project quantitatively. For example., say your state is thinking about implementing a sales tax, such a policy will have two immediate effects on the state's revenue. One is the immediate effect of the tax revenue. The other is the depressing supply side effects of the tax. If you can use an appropriate elasticity estimate from the existing literature to ping down the second effect, you can present a quantitatively and qualitatively rich story with appropriate innovations without actually doing field work!

Simple game theory experiments. Implement a strategic game that may be reflective of some issue in real life. Solve for the Nash Equilibira, serially dominant equilibrium, and etc. Ask for some volunteers to play against each other in this game. See if your empirical result matches with the theoretical prediction. If it does, say why it is so and what the theory would then imply about the real life issue. If it doesn't, say why and name the behavioural frictions that would make it this way.

Ideas for finance:

Measuring specific behaviour anomaly/patterns in asset pricing for none traditional markets. For example, you may want to see if the documented phenomenon of post unexpected profit announcement drift in US stocks also occurs in a developing market. The problem with this is that any neophyte in the field of empirical studies will make mistakes and errors in his employment of statistics and econometrics. You can have your supervisor look over your work to solve the issue.

GARCH fitting: Most GARCH codes assume Gaussian innovations. You may want to try using maximum likelihood with various other noise types, and test it on forecasting asset volatility for specific asset datasets. Its a straight forward project, and most instructors will be impressed by your programming and the seeming amount of work you put in.