Economics of Education Review 18 1999 79–88
What determines when undergraduates complete their theses? Evidence from two economics departments
Curt Lo¨fgren
a
, Henry Ohlsson
b,
a
Department of Economics, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
b
Department of Economics, Uppsala University, Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Received 1 December 1996; received in revised form 3 November 1997
Abstract
Most economics students at Uppsala and Umeå do not complete their undergraduate thesis within the intended time. We find that coauthoring, compared to writing alone, increases the probability of completing a thesis. A second thesis
is less likely to be completed than a first. The two departments also differ in completion time. The probability of completing decreases over time. There is also some weaker evidence that students with high grades are more likely to
complete and that women take a longer time to complete their theses. [JEL A22, I20].
1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Undergraduate economics education; Thesis completion; Event history analysis; Co-operative learning; Gender; Ability; Preferences
1. Introduction
There are two reasons why students may fail a univer- sity course: they choose not to make the effort necessary
to succeed andor they don’t have the ability necessary for success given any effort. In this paper we first present
a model of how students’ preferences and ability simul- taneously determine educational output. We use the
model to illustrate how to capture the differences between preferences and ability effects. Second, we
present empirical results in light of the theoretical model.
We focus on a particular educational production pro- cess: the completion of an undergraduate thesis. The the-
sis is a substantial part of college education in Sweden.
1
At a Swedish university the length of a semester is approximately 20 weeks. A thesis is needed for the
Bachelor’s degree C-thesis and another thesis is written for the Master’s degree D-thesis. The workload for
Corresponding author. E-mail: henry.ohlssonnek.uu.se
1
See Appendix A for a more extensive description of the courses in economics.
0272-775798 - see front matter
1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 7 2 - 7 7 5 7 9 8 0 0 0 0 5 - 3
each of the theses is expected to be 10 weeks the full- time equivalent of half a semester.
Many students, however, do not complete their theses within this expected time. This is the case for more than
half of the students in our data set. One out of five stu- dents have still not completed seven semesters after they
first registered for the thesis course. The important ques- tions are: What are the determinants of thesis com-
pletion? Are the effects on the probability of completion that we can trace due to preferences andor ability?
Our main result is that coauthoring, compared to writ- ing alone, increases the probability of completing a the-
sis. Moreover, a student writing a second thesis D- thesis is less likely to complete than a student writing
a first thesis. The two departments also differ in com- pletion time. The probability of completing decreases
over time. There is also some weaker evidence that stu- dents with high grades are more likely to complete and
that women take longer time to complete their theses.
Our estimations suggest that the positive effect of coauthoring and the difference between the two depart-
ments have to do with ability or educational productions functions. The positive impact of high grades is also
80 C. Lo¨fgren, H. Ohlsson Economics of Education Review 18 1999 79–88
associated with ability. The negative effect of writing a second thesis has to do with preferences and so does the
decreasing probability over time. The lower probability of women is because of preferences, not ability.
The paper is structured as follows: In Section 2 we present a theoretical model of how the decision to com-
plete is made. The choice of variables and the descriptive facts are discussed in Section 3. Section 4 described the
estimation method. Empirical results are reported and discussed in Section 5. In Section 6 the main results are
summarized and discussed.
2. Theoretical framework
