Zhiling Wang obtains NWO Open Competition SSH-XS Grant

Zhiling receives this grant, with a maximum budget of 50,000 euro, to enable her to work on her project about the influence of student loans on mental health problems.

In her SSH-XS project Zhiling Wang will research how the student loan system in Dutch higher education influences students’ mental health problems over the full trajectory of their study. This natural experiment will investigate the effect of increased pressure during the high school exam year, as well as the effect of tighter financial constraints and higher debt during their studies. This will be the first study to provide large-scale causal evidence, linking student loan to mental health problems.

In 2022, the NWO (Dutch Research Council) launched a new format for the NWO Open Competition SSH call. In this format the SSH-XS pilot Call for proposals is specifically intended to encourage curiosity-driven and bold research that involves the relatively rapid exploration of a promising idea. These research projects are ground-breaking and are high risk-high gain. Most important is that the result of each project contributes to the advancement of science.

About Zhiling Wang and her research

Zhiling received her PhD (2016) from the Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute. She is also TI research master alumna. In October 2018 she joined the department of Applied economics of Erasmus School of Economics as an assistant professor. Her main research field is migration and economic geography, particularly focusing on linking labour mobility with regional economic development. In 2020, Zhiling Wang was among the first to quantitatively analyse the impact of the student loan system on the choice of study.