I grew up trailing behind my mother through a sprawling open-air market every Saturday morning. She wasn’t an economist — she was a seamstress who sold embroidered dresses from a wooden stall that had belonged to her father. I’d sit on an upturned crate and watch the chaos unfold around me: women haggling over the price of fabric, traders shouting over each other, the price of tomatoes doubling by noon when a delivery truck failed to show up. I didn’t know it then, but I was watching supply and demand play out in real time, unscripted and unapologetic. Years later, sitting in a university lecture hall while a professor drew neat intersecting lines on a whiteboard, I felt a strange disconnect. The graphs made sense, but they didn’t capture the noise, the urgency, the way my mother would lean in close to a customer and lower her voice when she named a price. That gap — between the tidy models and the messy reality — stayed with me, and when the time came to choose a dissertation topic, I knew I wanted to explore something in that space. I just wasn’t sure how to turn a childhood of market mornings into a researchable question.
I started by casting a wide net. I read papers on informal economies, on price formation in developing markets, on gender and bargaining power. The more I read, the more I realised that economics isn’t just about central banks and trade deficits — it’s about the choices people make every day under conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, and hope. I wanted my dissertation to be grounded in that human reality, not just in mathematical abstraction. When I began searching for a concrete topic, I came across a curated list of economics dissertation topics that helped me see what was possible. Some projects examined the impact of microfinance on women’s entrepreneurship in rural India, others explored how behavioural nudges influence pension saving decisions, and a few investigated the economic consequences of air pollution on labour productivity. That range gave me the confidence that my own curiosity — about how gender dynamics shape price negotiation in informal markets — could become a legitimate, well-defined research project.
The fieldwork was the hardest and most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I returned to the same market where I’d spent my childhood, now with a notebook and a voice recorder instead of a wooden crate to sit on. I interviewed dozens of vendors — women and men — about how they set their prices, how they bargained, and whether they felt they were treated differently by customers based on their gender. The stories were remarkable. Women consistently reported that they were offered lower initial prices by customers, that they were expected to concede more during negotiation, and that they worked harder to build relationships with repeat buyers to compensate for that gap. One woman, who sold handmade baskets, told me she deliberately brought her teenage son to the stall on busy days because “they pay him what they should be paying me.” Her quiet anger stayed with me long after the interview ended. The data, once I analysed it, backed up what the women told me: even after controlling for product type, experience, and stall location, female vendors earned significantly lower margins than their male counterparts. The market wasn’t a level playing field — it was a stage where gender scripts were performed every day, and the economic consequences were real.
What I discovered wasn’t just an academic finding to be filed away in a dissertation. It was a story about power, about the invisible ways that inequality reproduces itself in everyday transactions, about the resilience of women who navigate that terrain with skill and quiet defiance. My mother never called what she did “economics.” She called it survival. But she understood supply and demand better than any textbook could teach, and she taught me that the most important economic questions aren’t the ones asked in lecture halls. They’re the ones whispered between buyer and seller, the ones hidden in the price of a tomato at noon on a Saturday, the ones that shape who gets to thrive and who merely gets by.
If you’re considering an economics dissertation, my advice is to look beyond the graphs. Think about the markets you’ve walked through, the transactions you’ve witnessed, the inequalities that have made you pause and wonder why. The best research questions often start not with a journal article but with a moment of observation — a conversation, a price tag, a story that doesn’t add up. Follow that thread, and you might just find a topic that matters to you far beyond the deadline.