Theses (Bachelor and Master)

Application for a thesis is possible at any time of the year. Start your online application here.

• After the application and as soon as possible, we inform you about whether your application was successful or not. We also make an initial topic suggestion and match you with a thesis supervisor, based on the information that you provided.
• The next step is an initial meeting with your supervisor, which is followed by an intensive pre-thesis preparatory working phase of about 2 - 4 weeks.
• After the preparatory working phase, the thesis is officially registered, and the clock starts ticking (Bachelor: 8 weeks; Master: 22 weeks).
• While working on your thesis, you are required to participate in our thesis colloquium. One visit is mandatory, but more visits are possible if needed. At the moment Colloquiums are held online via Zoom; dates will be scheduled with your supervisor. The colloquiums are visited by the institute’s members, and by fellow students. Each student is supposed to present his/her thesis at least once after the registration, where presentations take about 10 minutes followed by a plenary discussion. Please coordinate your visit closely with your supervisor, and plan in advance.
• At the moment, digital submission of your thesis is sufficient, for details please find information on the ISC homepage. In the case of an empirical thesis, please also submit all raw data and syntax files used for the thesis.
• Grades are released approximately eight weeks after the submission of a thesis (or faster).

Please inform yourself about our current research topics and choose a topic that interests you.

Your thesis can be empirical and use one of the available data sets of the institute for HCM. Currently, the following data sets are available for thesis project

Pay Transparency and the EntgTranspG

• Establishment- and individual-level data

Executive Compensation

• Individual level pay, personality, attention, and turnover
• Firm level financial and environmental (ESG) performance, characteristics
• Stakeholder in pay design (consultants, blockholder, peer groups)

Working from home during the Covid-pandemic

• Individual-level dataset of employees and their partners
• Experiences of working from home during the pandemic: satisfaction outcomes, loneliness, types of commuting, work-home spillovers, spatial situation at home, division of housework, etc.

Under this category, you find current announcements of topics for Bachelor and Master theses that can be written in cooperation with an industry partner. Alternatively, you may use your own contacts and suggest a topic. Please note that we need to check if the topic is suitable for a Bachelor or Master thesis.

At the moment, we do not offer any current cooperations, but encourage you to get in touch, when you have the opportunity to conduct empirical research through your own contacts.

Students in the ETD can write their master thesis at the Institute for HCM. Please contact Ingo Weller if you are interested. Potential topics, among others, may be (the list is not conclusive but provides a few examples):

• Strategy and Human Resources
• Strategic Organization Design
• Employer Branding and Recruitment
• Talent Management
• Strategic Workforce Planning
• Flexible Working Arrangements
• HR Analytics