Master Thesis
If you are interested in writing your Master Thesis at the Professorship of Empirical Accounting, please directly contact Prof. Dr. Michael Stich via email to make an individual appointment for a first non-committal meeting.
The key requirements for a Master Thesis at the Professorship of Empirical Accounting are (1) a sound fundament in empirical research techniques and (2) strong enthusiasm for open-minded dealing with and empirically evaluating contemporary economic questions in the fields of accounting, governance, and/or environmental sustainability. Specialized competences in financial and non-financial reporting standards are not required.
Every potential candidate for a Master Thesis has to pass though the course Applied Empirical Accounting Research prior to the beginning of the Master Thesis which is an extracurricular forum to self-develop a research idea to be prepared to successfully pass the non-trivial challenge of (first-time) conducting an empirical research project. The duration for writing a Master Thesis at the Professorship of Empirical Accounting is six months.
February 3, 2020
Student Interest in Master Thesis at the Professorship of Empirical Accounting
The Professorship of Empirical Accounting regularly offers the possibility to write the Master Thesis on research topics in a close-supervision approach. Our topic range covers the entire spectrum of major current trends and challenges, including changes in accounting regulation, corporate sustainability, and digital transformation.
We are truly proud that Master students from various study programs of the University of Cologne are increasingly interested to write their Master Thesis at the Professorship of Empirical Accounting. Over the last months, we received mails from more than 25 students referring to the possibility to write the Master Thesis at our professorship.
Since the installation of the Professorship of Empirical Accounting in 2017, we always conducted an "all interested students with great ideas are warmly welcome" policy and, due to the tight supervision approach, guaranteed that the Master Thesis is corrected/graded within one week. In other words, when a candidate was able to present an own promising research idea and convincingly shows passion for doing research in this field, we always accepted all applications and did our very best to provide a supportive research environment for the Master Thesis.
Given the high the demand in the last and current semester, we are unfortunate that this policy has to be changed for future application because our small professorship is simply no longer able to provide tight and individual supervision for the Master Thesis for all applicants. Thus, please note that we cannot accept further candidates for Master Thesis until the end of the winter semester 2020/2021.