Georg Granic and Matthijs Korevaar 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

Georg Granic (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Project: Powering Up Revealed Preference Tests: Optimised Budget Designs for Realistic Decision Errors

Economists test whether people make high quality decisions by giving them repeated allocation tasks: dividing income between two options at varying prices. Standard tests assume that low quality decisions are completely random, not the small, realistic mistakes people actually make. This means many studies falsely conclude that stress, distraction, or alcohol have no effect on decision quality, when in reality the test simply wasn't good enough to pick it up. This project develops a smarter way to design these tests, one that reliably detects real-world imperfections, and confirms its advantage in a controlled laboratory experiment.

Matthijs Korevaar (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Project: The Housing Matthew Effect: Does Home Equity Shape Access to Opportunity?

Most homeowners build wealth through their home, but that money is locked up until they sell. At that point, families choose: put the equity back into housing, or cash it out? If equity keeps flowing into more expensive homes in better neighborhoods, small differences in home equity can accumulate into large inequality. This project uses Dutch data to study whether home equity determines which neighborhoods families end up in, and what that means for their children.