Some guidelines on how to write a literature based seminar paper may also be helpful when writing a Master thesis. For formatting suggestions, see the \(\LaTeX\) section below.

I created a template for students who want to get started with \(\LaTeX\). Read the "Getting Started" part as well as the page on "Document Structure" of the wikibook first. These parts also cover the installation of \(\LaTeX\) and of a useable text editor (for beginners I recommend TeXmaker as an editor). Reading and installation should take you less than 90 minutes and those might be the best invested 90 minutes of your student life. Then have a look at the following files: .tex (with explanations of common usage), .bib (bibliography file), example graphic, .pdf (the compiled output), plain .tex template. If the use of BibTeX for citations is unclear, check Martin Osborne's guide.

The template above is relatively simple and well suited for term papers or a Bachelor project. There is another template for Master theses which contains a title page, table of contents etc.: .tex, .pdf, you need the same example graphic and bibliography as above and also the seal of the university in the same folder as the .tex file.

I created some jupyter notebooks that explain how you can make professionally looking plots, numerically solve maximization problems and numerically solve (systems of) equations. I think all of this can be extremely helpful when writing a seminar paper or a thesis. The backend for all this is the julia programming language but no prior knowledge of programming is required. The notebooks can be found here. If you want to learn programming in julia from scratch, you may want to check out this tutorial. (For, more examples where Julia is used to solve problems in (macro)economics, see here.)

Microeconomic theory makes heavy use of mathematics. The following books are recommended background reading in mathematics:

• for Bachelor students in economics: Simon and Blume, "Mathematics for Economists", W.W. Norton & Company, 1994
• for Master students in economics: (part I and II in) de la Fuente, "Mathematical Methods and Models in Economics", Cambridge University Press, 2000
• for PhD students in economics: Ok, "Real Analysis with Economic Applications", Princeton University Press, 2007