Written works

You can find the formal requirements by the Faculty of SES here.

Bachelor’s and Master’s Theses Guidelines

Both bachelor's and master's theses can be written at the Chair of Applied Econometrics and Public Policies, with Prof. Martin Huber as the supervisor. Teaching assistants are available to assist with methodological, technical, or organizational questions regarding the thesis.

Thesis Structure

The thesis must be an empirical study that applies quantitative methods (e.g., instrumental variable methods, difference-in-differences, synthetic control, fixed effects regression, time series regression, machine learning,…) to conduct a causal or predictive analysis (e.g., what is the effect of an explanatory variable X on a dependent variable Y, or which model can be used to predict or forecast a dependent variable Y) using empirical data (which may come from sources such as administrative data collected by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office or publicly available data from Google Dataset Search, Our World in Data, etc.).

The general structure of the thesis is as follows:

• Introduction: Motivation of the research question and discussion of the related literature.
• Data: Description of the data source and data processing, and descriptive statistics of key variables.
• Methodology: Discussion of the methods applied, the statistical assumptions of these methods, and the plausibility/appropriateness of the assumptions and methods in the given empirical context.
• Results: Presentation and interpretation of the empirical results using plots, regression tables, etc.
• Conclusion: Summary of the main results/key findings and discussion of possible limitations of the analysis.

Topic Selection

Students may either suggest research topics on their own or ask Prof. Huber to suggest a topic to them. To suggest a topic or to explore available topics, please contact Prof. Huber at martin.huber@unifr.ch.