Anne Gielen and Wendun Wang obtain a NWO SSH Open Competition M Grant

About the NWO SSH Open Competition M grants

In 2022, the NWO (Dutch Research Council) launched a revised format for the NWO SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) Open Competition. Within this format the OC M Call for proposals is specifically intended for free, curiosity-driven research projects with a primary social and/or humanities research question, aimed at excellent disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary research.

About Anne Gielen

Anne Gielen is a full professor of Labour Economics and Policy at Erasmus School of Economics. She obtained her PhD in  2008 at Tilburg University. She has successfully advanced our understanding of how socio-economic inequality persists within and across generations. She pushed a new subfield on intergenerational benefit dependence, supported by, among others, a Marie Curie-IEF (2013) and NWO Vidi grant (2018). Her work is grounded in robust empirical methods using natural experiments and rich administrative data and published in top-tier international journals and is widely recognised for its methodological rigor and policy relevance.

Exploring the labour market effects of menopause

Anne Gielen’s OC M project is titled “Hormones at work: How menopause affects women’s labour market outcomes’’. Due to an increase in female labour force participation since the second half of the 20th century, today’s labour market is characterised by a large share of working women aged 50-65. Although this trend has a positive impact on women and society at large in terms of women's empowerment, human capital, and overall economic growth, it also comes with new challenges. One such challenge is that an increasing share of the working population is affected by menopause, and the health burden that often comes with it. This may have substantial consequences for women’s wellbeing and gender inequality in society. Yet, evidence on the impact of (peri-) menopause on women’s careers is scarce. This project fills this gap by studying the causal impact of experiencing menopause on women’s employment outcomes and career development, aiming to reduce the gender inequalities in the labour market.

About Wendun Wang

Wendun Wang is an associate professor at the Econometrics department of Erasmus School of Economics. He obtained his PhD in 2013 at Tilburg University. His research specialises in econometrics with both theoretical and empirical contributions in areas such as panel data analysis, missing data techniques, forecasting, estimation of treatment effects, among others. He has a proven track record in international top publications.

Mapping evolving connections in complex data structures

Wendun Wang’s OC M project is titled “Bringing hidden patterns to light: Uncovering hidden network connections in complex data”. With the rapid advancement of digitalisation and the big data revolution, multi-dimensional panel data are gaining popularity across various scientific fields. Unlike traditional panel datasets, which contain observations across two dimensions (e.g., multiple firms observed over time), multi-dimensional panel data introduce a third or even higher dimension, offering richer and more complex information. Wang’s project focuses on two critical aspects of multi-dimensional panel data: (1) network dependence and (2) time instability. The goal is to recover latent network structures in multi-dimensional panels (determining which observations are connected) and to track how these latent networks evolve over time.