Betreuung von Abschlussarbeiten

Summer Term 2020

Since the chair of corporate finance will be dissolved by the end of the summer term 2020, all bachelor and master theses have to be registered rather soon. We expect students to start working on their thesis immediately after the allocation has be finalized by the examination office.

Please contact the Chair immediately after the official publication of supervisors for topic allocation.

All Master Theses at the Chair of Corporate Finance must be registered with the Examination Office by April 20, 2020 at the latest and completed by the end of August, 2020.

All Bachelor Theses at the Chair of Corporate Finance must be registered with the Examination Office by June 1, 2020 at the latest and completed by mid-August, 2020.

Application:

Please apply for a thesis slot at our chair via the general official procedure. We accept applications outside the official procedure only in exceptional cases.

Language:

For most supervisors, you are free to write in English or German (as long as your course of study allows you to choose). Satchit Sagade and Vincenzo Pezone only supervise in English.

Topics:

Below you find the areas of our expertise. In justified cases, we also supervise thesis outside these areas. In these cases, the students must be aware that we can only offer limited guidance and supervision. Since this is a frequent issue, please note that our chair has no expertise in M&A.

We have a list of topics that students can work on. Students can also suggest own topics, in coordination with the supervisor, who then also decides if the topic is accepted. +

Procedure:

After you are allocated to our chair, we contact all allocated thesis writers and try to match students to supervisors by areas of interest. This typically works very well, but please note that we cannot guarantee that anyone gets a specific topic or supervisor. The exact topic is then decided in the dialogue between student and supervisor.

The starting dates for writing/registration is typically free and flexible, but should be discussed at the first meeting. If you are allocated to our chair, you are free to start writing your thesis any day during the semester. Nevertheless, you have to reply to our initial contact and state your envisaged starting date. Note that as soon as the topic is fixed you have to register your thesis. We do not allow for an extended period of time where you can work on your topic without registration of the thesis.

Expectations:

We prefer empirical thesis. While for a Bachelor thesis a pure literature review is acceptable in certain cases, a master thesis must contain an empirical part.

1.       Banking & Shadow Banking (Jannic Cutura)

a.       The impact of financial regulation (bailin/bailout, subordinated debt & market discipline, CoCo bonds)

b.      Shadow Banking (Risk taking in the mutual funds, interconnectedness in the financial sector, money market short term debt funding)

c.    Machine Learning & textual analysis in Finance (in the context of: Bond rating, Banking, and related; NOT asset pricing)

2.       Capital Markets (Tobias Sichert)

a.      Empirical Asset Pricing (e.g. CAPM anomalies, factor models; note: mostly empirical work;.experiences teaches that experience with empirical work is required, especially at the Bachelor level)

b.      Portfolio Choice, Portfolio Optimization (e.g. determining the market portfolio)

c.    Options (e.g. option pricing, option returns)

3.     Financial Market Design (Satchit Sagade)

a. Market Microstructure: Market Liquidity,  Trading and Exchanges, 

     High-Frequency trading (HFT), Market fragmentation, etc.

b. Market Regulation: MiFID, EMIR, Dodd-Frank, etc.

c. Exchange-Traded Funds (ETF): Impact of ETFs on market quality,

    Synthetic ETFs, etc.

d. Interfact of market microstructure with other areas of financial economics

     such as corporate finance and asset pricing.

e. Central Counterparties (CCPs): Impact of clearing, regulation, etc.

4.  Behavioral Finance (Peter Ockenfels)

a. All kinds of behavioral finance topics. Topic is always found in dialog with

    student

5.  Banking and Political Economy (Oliver Schlüter):

a. Banking Regulation, Financial Stability (Impact of new regulation on lending

    behaviour of banks and the real economy)

b. Political Economy (Political connections of firms and the impact on political

    decisions and the real economy)

c. Corporate Culture (CEO characteristics, CEO compensation, textual analysis)

d. Upon request: Empirical Asset Pricing (Return anomalies and factor models)

6.  On request: 

Labor and Finance (unions, implicit contracts...), Law and Finance,

Behavioral Corporate Finance (overconfidence, market timing...)

7. Household Finance (Nora Laurinaityte)

a. All topics related to household saving, portfolio behavior, borrowing

     decisions, and investment choices (empirical)

b. Corporate Finance (capital structure/leverage choice, financial constraints)

c. Empirical Asset Pricing (factor models, return anomalies)

  d. Upon request: Private Equity and Hedge Fund performance evaluation;

    Climate Change Finance (climate changeand real estate prices, ESG

    and corporate valuation, Socially Responsible Investments)