Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Theses & References

Basic Rules for Writing a Bachelor or Master’s Thesis at our Institute
 

Pre-conditions

  • BSc Thesis: you need to have passed one course (seminar or lecture course) taught by Prof Wolf or PhD students/ Postdocs of the institute. The compulsory "Einführung in die Volkswirtschaftslehre und Wirtschaftsgeschichte" does not qualify. 
  • MSc Thesis: you need to have passed one course (seminar or lecture course) taught by Prof Wolf or PhD students/ Postdocs of the institute.
  • In our research we focus on the quantitative analysis of economic history. Hence, basic knowledge of empirical (statistical, econometric) methods and software (Stata or R) is essential.

Procedure

  1. If you are interested in writing your Bachelor or Master’s thesis at our Institute, please make an appointment for Prof. Wolf's office hour. 
  2. Once you are registered for a thesis, you will participate in our thesis seminar ("Studienabschlussseminar"), where you have the chance to present your topic.
  3. Usually, we suggest the topic of your thesis. We will, however, make exceptions if you provide a sound rationale for another topic. See here for a list of suggested topics.
  4. Your Bachelor or Master’s thesis will be supervised and evaluated by Prof. Wolf. One of our PhD students/ Postdocs can provide additional supervision and guidance.

 

Writing Guidelines for your Bachelor or Master’s Thesis

  • Regarding structure and formal requirements, please read and follow the guidelines. We strongly recommend using our LaTeX template.
  • Concerning the length of your thesis, we expect you write about 30 pages for a Bachelor thesis and about 60 pages for a Master’s thesis, in both cases excluding the appendix.
  • With regard to citation and references, we ask you to follow a few rules:
  1. Please use in-text (= author-year) citation.
  2. For an example, see this article by Prof. Wolf.

 

Basic Rules for Requesting a Reference from Prof. Wolf
  • All references or assessments must be requested in person at least two weeks before their due date.
  • We need your latest Transcript of Records, a short CV, and details about the format, recipient and deadline for the reference letter