Question: Topic: Investigate whether financial conservative policies depend on financial distress.
Dissertations should:
1) be double spaced;
2) be no more than 12,000 words (tables, graphs, appendices, and references are included in the counting);
3) be prefaced by an abstract of about 100 words;
TENTATIVE STRUCTURE
Introduction: give a motivation of the issue and explain how you will address the question. Give a structure of the work.
Literature Review: overview of the main contributions to the subject you are examining.
Theoretical Framework: set out the relevant economics/finance theory and state the hypotheses you will test.
Data: describe your dataset; provide the relevant descriptive statistics of the variables; identify the statistical characteristics; you may also use graphs to summarize the main features of the data.
Empirical Framework: discuss your choice of the statistical model, explain and justify the estimation method.
Results: present and interpret the results from your estimation and hypotheses testing; highlight the main conclusions; comment on whether the empirical evidence is consistent with the underlying theory; report results from robustness checks.
Conclusions: give an outline of your research work, explain what we have learned from it, discuss policy implications etc.
References: this section is extremely important. Every piece of information used during your analysis must be included: books, articles and consulted web pages as well.