Thomas de Graaff, Tom Van Ourti and Carlos Riumallo Herl awarded with NWO SSH XS grant

The NWO Open Competition SSH XS Call is specifically intended to encourage curiosity-driven and bold research that involves the relatively rapid exploration of a promising idea (12 months maximum). The research projects must be ground-breaking and are high risk-high gain. Most important is that the result of each project contributes to the advancement of science.

Granted Projects in alphabetical order

Thomas de Graaff (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Project: A Scalable Text-Based method to Recover Historical Housing Prices

Historical housing prices are largely unobserved before the 1990s, limiting research on long-run housing affordability. This project develops a method to extract local housing prices and rents from digitized historical newspapers. The method identifies housing advertisements, prices, rents and housing characteristics, and links them to locations and dates. The project will deliver a reproducible historical housing price and rent panels that can be reused across a wide range of research applications beyond housing affordability. All code will be made openly available, ensuring transparency and replicability.

Tom Van Ourti (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Project: Does it take a village? The Social and Economic Impacts of Community-Based Mental Health Care for Women in Low-Resource Settings

More than one billion people live with mental disorders worldwide, the majority in low- and middle-income countries where access to care–especially in rural and underserved communities--remains limited. Although the World Health Organization promotes expanding community-based mental health services, quantitative evidence on impacts beyond psychological wellbeing remains scarce. This project exploits georeferenced data and Peru’s national rollout of community mental health centers to evaluate whether improved access affects women’s labor market participation, exposure to domestic violence, and parental investments in children. By linking mental health policy to socioeconomic outcomes, the study asks whether expanding mental health care can drive development.

Carlos Riumallo Herl (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Project: Understanding and Overcoming Low Preventive Medication Adherence in Pregnancy

This project examines why people often do not follow recommended preventive treatments and how simple interventions can improve adherence. Using a carefully designed experiment, it tests strategies such as reminders, information on benefits, and involvement of family members to understand the behavioural factors that influence whether individuals take medications consistently. The study aims to reveal how behavioural biases, like focusing on immediate costs or underestimating long-term benefits, affect health decisions. The findings will inform scalable interventions to improve adherence across a range of medications and preventive treatments, with potential to enhance health outcomes in low-resource settings worldwide.