Writing a Thesis
My First Experience
In order to fulfil the requirements of a bachelor’s degree, students at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics (SBE) must write a thesis. The thesis can either take the form of a research proposal, a literature review, or a small-scale research paper. My interest in economic research led me to sign up for the MaRBLe program which allows students to engage in a small-scale research project. While the experience was interesting, I did not fully take advantage of the research opportunity offered by the program. In this article, I discuss the research experience and three potential improvements for future research projects.
Start early
The school allocates a full semester to the bachelor’s thesis and in the MaRBLe program, outside of a few strict deadlines, students are given a sizeable amount of freedom to set their own agenda with their supervisor. I contacted my supervisor in early September and we exchanged a few words a few days later. During this meeting, the first objective was set: find a research topic.
While I only had a vague idea of the topic I wanted to explore, I knew that I wanted to write my thesis at the Microeconomics and Public Economics department to research on a topic related to pensions. This topic seemed to relate quite well to the current news of the time. The demographic trends in many European nations have led many governments to adjust their pension schemes and welfare states. Examples include France increasing the minimum pension age from $62$ to $64$ while in Belgium, the legal retirement age will gradually increase from $65$ to $67$ years by $2030$.
During this step, I slowly came to the realization that while finding a research topic is difficult, formulating it can be even more challenging.
The main problem was that I was looking for the research topic rather than a research topic that I could find passion in writing. This indecisiveness made me lose quite a few valuable weeks of work. Once I had a better idea of the direction of my thesis, the topic was still too vague. I had a lot of difficulties communicating my desired topic to my supervisor. I could never find the correct words to define the topic in one or two sentences.
The indecisiveness did not only delay the start of the thesis writing but also made finding relevant literature more difficult. I explored many different aspects of economic research on pensions. Topics included risk preferences of pension fund clients in the Netherlands, gender inequalities in pension systems, attitudes towards solidarity in the Dutch pension system, and attitudes towards inequality and fairness views. My final topic can somehow be understood as a mix of all those topics. I made the choice to investigate attitudes towards financial fertility incentives.
I chose this because literature and news reports show that many European countries have attempted to reduce population ageing by implementing so-called fertility incentives to encourage (young) adults to have more children. Although many people understand that population growth is necessary to sustain Europe’s social security systems, it is uncertain whether the public would support extending current fertility incentives.
This research question was investigated by means of a survey shared with my personal network. The time lost due to the delay meant that by the time I started sharing the survey a little more than three months had already passed. This probably significantly limited the number of participants that I could reach on my own.
Choose your variables wisely
Another aspect of the research was defining the variables that I would investigate. This required defining how the survey content would be presented but also what would be presented to the partcipants. The chosen setup was a spectator game in which participants are presented with $4$ cases with two different families and they are asked to allocate a set budget between the two families. The families differ in the number of children, and the working status of the parents.
Those differences aim elicit attitudes towards child benefits but also the presence of stay-at-home parents. People with different beliefs on how a child should be raised might also have different allocative preferences. The implicit assumption of my research was that participants would assign a greater share of the budget to families (with children) that lived in ways that most align with their own personal values.
However, the analysis showed that, at least among the participants, different personal attitudes did not result in sizeably different allocative preferences. Additionally, the participants were not found to particularly differ in attitudes towards child benefits. This is largely due to the small size and non-representative nature of the sample. since most participants were found in my personal network, I could have had a tendency to bond with people who shared a particular set of attitudes towards fertility policy.
Keep all the information
Another factor that potentially decreased the significance of the relationships estimated in the research is an arbitrary decision that I made in the creation of the variables. I had a preferences for using dummy (0-1) variables to represent the different attitudes elicited in the survey as I thought it would simplify the interpretation of the model. However, the arbitary classification of predictor variables into groups is detrimental to most statistical analysesWynants, L., van Smeden, M., McLernon, D.J. et al. Three myths about risk thresholds for prediction models. BMC Med 17, 192 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-019-1425-3. This results in a loss of information as the binary classification assigns the same value to someone right above the threshold and someone far above the threshold.
Last Comments
The MaRBLe program provides a valuable opportunity to discover the world of academic research. If your university offers a similar research opportunity, I can only encourage you to join. Make sure to start as early as possible to fully take advantage of the time assigned to the research project and do not hesitate to engage with your professors or professionals in the areas you are interested in. I got the chance to discuss with a macroeconomic researcher at APG during my thesis and I have learned a lot about his research at the company and the company itself.