Fundamental Methods of Empirical Research in Business Administration

This course introduces students to fundamental approaches to design an effective empirical strategy for a given research question. We will start with an overview of contributions from the philosophy of science that help structuring the type of research questions and statement categories that are to be supported with empirical research. We continue with an overview of the types of data used in empirical research in business and economic sciences. Conditional on the combination of research objectives with data, different methods are appropriate. Students are introduced to the major approaches. We will zoom in on two dominant domains of regression analysis, which is the workhorse of empirical research in business and economics. These are panel data models and methods for causal inference.

In this course, we will focus on training two skills:

(1) Understand the requirements, advantages, and disadvantages of empirical methods to choose the most appropriate one to answer a research question.

(2) Understand the principles of major domains of empirical methods

Structure of the course

The course includes three components

• Material presented and discussed by the instructor
• Articles prepared by students for discussion in class
• Empirical designs developed for a given research question and students’ own project

Doctoral students in business administration in the 2022 doctoral regulations need to register via KLIPS in the first enrollment phase.