Final theses

1. Prerequisites

• You should have completed the courses in empirical economics (I and II).
• You should be interested in empirical work.
• You should have knowledge of a (statistical) programming language such as Stata, R, or Python.

2. Applications

Introduce an abstract of your chosen topic. Send the abstract and your transcript of records to Ms. Leinonen.

You can write your master or bachelor thesis in the following topics. The thesis can be written in German or English.

Labor supply: Labor supply decisions of individuals and couples are an important driving force for within-household and between-household inequality. Interesting questions are related to the determinants of these choices and the consequences of unvoluntary job losses. To work on these topics, a basic knowledge of Python would be highly appreciated.

• How did gender role attitudes change during and after the Covid-19-pandemic? (LISS panel)
• How does happiness of parents change around child birth? (pairfam or SOEP or LISS panel)
• How is the labor supply of parents related to pre-birth job characteristics of the parents (like schedule flexibility, remote work ability)? (SOEP)
• How important is working long hours (more than normal full time job) for career progression and associated gender gaps? (SOEP or LISS panel)
• Do political attitudes change when people become unemployed? (LISS panel)

Contact person: Dr. Zimpelmann

Altruism in the Workplace: For individuals with altruistic preferences, helping others and caring about their well-being is essential. We aim to understand the professions in which altruistic people typically work and which companies would benefit from hiring them. The following suggested topics will help us explore the role of altruism in the workplace.

What types of jobs do altruistic individuals tend to pursue? Here, you can analyse which industries and positions have a notably high or low presence of altruistic individuals.

Do employers gain advantages from hiring employees with altruistic preferences? You can look into the differences across various industries and positions within companies.

Contact person: Mr. Berendsen

Long-term care: As people age, policy makers and researchers are becoming more concerned with the issues of long-term care services for the elderly. Possible thesis topics in this field use the German Socio-Economic Panel:

Possible topics are:

• The effect of ambulatory care on labor market participation of caregivers.
• The effect of socio-demographic characteristics on satisfaction with the availability of care.

Contact person: Ms. Van Damme

Non-monetary incentives and the future of work: Not only the salary plays a role for the employee on the labor market, but also other, non-monetary incentives, such as flexibility at the workplace or the meaningfulness of the work. In the following topic you can examine the role of non-monetary incentives in the labor market.

Possible topics are:

• Do unionized employees have better working conditions? An empirical analysis.
• Life satisfaction and social work norms: A consideration across all age groups.

Contact person: Mr. Judy

Health and the family: At the frontier between health economics and family economics, we seek to understand the mechanisms within the household that influence the health of its members. Indeed, highlighting the link between the family and health-related behaviours, decisions and investments is essential to generate evidence to guide public policies aimed at improving health and reducing health inequalities.

Possible topics are:

• Health investments in a family context and the influence of spouses on each other's health.
• The link between marriage markets and health decisions: do individuals choose healthier spouses and what are the implications for their subsequent health investments?

Contact person: Ms. Mathevet

Household decisions and the role of professional flexibility:
The latest research suggests that women face large and persistent income losses after having children, lower labor force participation, reduced labor supply and a higher tendency to have flexible jobs. These empirical findings are, among other things, the result of decision-making processes at the household level. It is therefore becoming increasingly important for political decision-makers to understand the role of the budget in order to be able to change existing structures.

With the help of the data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), students have two options:

Topic 1: Cross-sectional analysis

• What do household members use their time for, does this depend on work flexibility, and what is the impact of children on time use?

Topic 2: Panel Analysis

• How does the change in the flexibility of one spouse affect the other spouse's time allocation and ability to participate?
• How does work flexibility, labor market participation and time management within the household change around the birth of the first child?

Contact person: Mr. Wintzéus

Empirical topics on hours of work and housing size.

Hours of work. Many reforms have attempted to regulate working hours. In practice, these do not always work, and people do not always work the same amount of hours stated in their contracts. A first topic would look at how effective such reforms are:

• The German working time law (2006): what happened to hours of work?​

Housing. Different people choose to spend their money in different ways. The decision of whether and which house to buy is for many people the most important financial decision they make during their lifetime. In this project, you look at how groups of people differ in the houses that they buy.

• Differences in house size in Germany: which demographic groups have the biggest houses?

Contact person: Mr. De Schouwer