Writing a BA thesis
An overall point on the way I see an applied BA thesis: a BA thesis is your first empirical project written in a scientific form. The output should have the same structure and scope as a scientific article in a top economic publication. For reference, top-field journals in the field of study can be used as examples (e.g., Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Labour Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Applied Econometrics, etc.).
The length does not exceed 25 pages, results are presented in tables and graphs.
The length does not exceed 25 pages, results are presented in tables and graphs.
Structure
The structure is:
- Introduction
- Motivation (why should the reader care about my research question/topic?)
- Research question (what am I investigating?)
- Outline of data, methods, and results (what am I doing in this paper and how am I answering the research question?)
- Contribution: short, on-point literature review (what am I adding, why is my paper interesting and how does it address the research gap/add new knowledge?)
- Data
- Identification (how do I identify a causal effect?)
- Results
- Conclusion (with discussion of limitations)
- Bibliography
- Appendix (code, robustness, further tests, etc.)
Overall tone
The scope of a paper is to convince your reader that your research question is interesting and that you are able to answer your research question seriously. Be honest, do not oversell (making claims that are not supported by your findings), and be aware of the limitations of your paper.
