Writing an undergraduate thesis requires participating in two terms of bi-weekly thesis seminars and you will be guided to also identify and contact experts in the field of your topic. This module is currently available for around 25 students.

Aims: You will experience what it means to undertake an independent research project, from finding and formulating a proper research question, searching and identifying useful, academic, literature and properly summarizing the current state of your subject area before attempting to answer your research question on te basis of literature and your own analysis. Projects can be empirical, theoretical, data-driven, literature-driven and interdisciplinary.

Objectives:

To undertake a significant piece of independent research work;
	To gain experience in reading, processing and summarizing a significant amount of literature on a specialised aspect of Economics;
	To gain practical experience in formulating research questions and refining these on the basis of relevant literature, data and discussions with fellow students and supervisor(s);
	To gain experience in finding and analysing data and/or using, developing and validating and estimating models;
	To report about individual work in “work-in-progress” presentations in the bi-weekly Thesis Seminar;
	To report about the research work in writing in a thesis of around 7500 words.
Suitable For: Final year Economics (L100 and L101) students, compulsory for final year Economics L102 students. Open to joint-degree students with explicit written permission from their home department. Not open to affiliate students. Cannot be taken with ECON0042: Economics Independet Research Project.

Prerequisites: Students must have completed the first two years of their single- or joint-honours undergraduate degrees.

Assumed knowledge: Students coming into the module should have a good understanding of economics theory (both microeconomics and macroeconomics). They should have a sound knowledge of econometrics. They should be familiar with one of the major software packages, e.g. STATA, R, Mathematica (or equivalent). They should have good essay writing and presentation skills.