Teresa Bago d’Uva, Georg Granic, and Matthijs Korevaar obtain NWO XS grant

About the NWO Open Competition SSH XS grants

The NWO SSH has three different funding programmes in the Open Competition. The XS grants are for ideas that hold great promise and are available for projects with a maximum budget of 50,000 euro. To enable curiosity-driven, innovative research. The research projects are ground-breaking and high risk-high gain. Applicants assess each other’s proposal through anonymous peer review. The Call for proposals of 2026 has 3 rounds in total.

Project of Teresa Bago d’Uva: "Measuring the Hidden Costs of Childcare Policy"

The Netherlands plans to replace its current childcare allowance with a new system that is simpler and more predictable for parents. That sounds promising, but simpler does not automatically mean better: the reform could also lead to longer waiting lists and higher childcare costs. This project will reveal who gains, who loses, and whether the new system truly improves families’ lives. By studying how parents value affordability, certainty, and access to childcare in a choice experiment, the project will provide new evidence on whether the reform makes childcare more workable, fairer, and more effective, especially for low-income households.

Project of Georg Granic: ''Powering Up Revealed Preference Tests: Optimised Budget Designs for Realistic Decision Errors''

This project develops a sharper way to test how well people make decisions. Existing tests rest on an unrealistic assumption: that a bad decision is a completely random one. Real mistakes are usually smaller and subtler, so these tests are too blunt to catch them, and often wrongly conclude that factors like stress, distraction, or alcohol have no effect on the quality of our choices. The new test will be sensitive enough to detect these real-world slips.

Project of Matthijs Korevaar: ''The Housing Matthew Effect: Does Home Equity Shape Access to Opportunity?''

For most homeowners, the sale of their home is the moment their largest asset becomes liquid. They must choose: reinvest the equity or extract it. If equity disproportionately sticks to housing, and families don't just buy bigger homes but move to better neighborhoods, small differences can compound, giving some families access to better schools and stronger prospects while others are left behind. This project uses Dutch administrative data to document what families do with their equity at sale, and exploits a mortgage reform and house price variation to test whether equity causally shapes where families end up.