Dissertation help

Hi
I’m struggling to pick my dissertation topic. I wanna dosomething on income inequality but it’s such a heavilyresearched topic and I’m not sure what I can furtherresearch about it. I talked to my supervisor about notknowing that exactly I want to look at about inequality andhe just said I can’t help you with that you just have to picksomething you’re interested in.
Can anyone give me any advice ?
Thanks

Hi
I’m struggling to pick my dissertation topic. I wanna dosomething on income inequality but it’s such a heavilyresearched topic and I’m not sure what I can furtherresearch about it. I talked to my supervisor about notknowing that exactly I want to look at about inequality andhe just said I can’t help you with that you just have to picksomething you’re interested in.
Can anyone give me any advice ?
Thanks

It would really really depend on what you can get data on and whether there has been any previous studies done in your area (breaking new grounds in research is rare, and you would have to be pretty exceptional in order to do this).

When you mention inequality, the first thing that pops to mind is the Gini Index. See:
https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/gender-statistics/series/SI.POV.GINI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
https://www.statista.com/statistics/872472/gini-index-of-the-united-kingdom/
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/methodologies/theginicoefficient
https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-gini-coefficient
https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/income-inequality/about/metrics/gini-index.html

When it comes to income inequality, it comes down to more of a development studies topic as opposed to something related to economics (not sure what degree that you're doing). However, you should be able to find some economic models on inequality out there if you look hard enough.

When thinking of applied research projects at uni, I often found it helpful to first think of what econometric methods/models have you actually been taught, then to Google a bunch of applied econometric papers linked to inequality and try to think whether anything similar to these can be done with the models you know.

Often it can be something simple such as some person doing X study in Y country, and you just do the same but on another country, or doing something similar with a slightly different focus or data. They're not looking for you to reinvent the wheel or anything, you just need to produce research that provides the most marginal addition to the economic literature on a topic.

As highlighted in the above post, main issue on equality will likely be the availability of high quality of data. Lots of surveys of households in developed countries often have access restricted to certified researchers, while there is just less data overall in developing countries. Another issue is that quite a lot of the econometric methods in general inequality research are often above undergrad level, things like censoring and quantile regression.

But the first step is to just look at a tonne of journal articles on inequality to spark ideas. Often you can go into big popular journal websites and filter for the inequality. But it's unlikely that you'll be able to pick a good topic without doing a tonne of reading.