Matthew Robson and Daniel Urban awarded with SSH-XS grant

About the NWO Open Competition SSH-XS grants

In 2022, the NWO (Dutch Research Council) launched the NWO Open Competition SSH call. This Call is allocated in three different grants, of which the XS grant is specifically intended to encourage curiosity-driven and bold research that involves the relatively rapid exploration of a promising idea. The research projects will be ground-breaking and are high risk-high gain. Most important is that the result of each project contributes to the advancement of science.

About the proposal of Matthew Robson

Matthew Robson is a postdoctoral research fellow at Erasmus School of Economics. His research focuses on inequality, social preferences and distributive justice; and draws on experimental, health and welfare economics.

His proposal is entitled “Your Money or Your Health? A Novel Experiment on Aversion to Inequalities in Income and Health and Paternalistic Motivations”. Public policies can impact on inequalities in health and income and may constrain freedom of choice in each of these dimensions of wellbeing. Public support for policies therefore depends on relative aversion to inequalities in these two dimensions and willingness to act paternalistically. Matthew will design and run a novel experiment to provide the first evidence of the public’s aversion to health and income inequalities and their support for paternalism. Based on this evidence, he will develop an online policy tool to inform decision makers of public support for policies which affect population health and income.

About the proposal of Daniel Urban

Daniel Urban is an assistant professor in the section Finance within the Department of Business Economics at Erasmus School of Economics. His research interests are in corporate finance, corporate governance, private equity, sustainability, boards, and household finance. 

The title of his proposal is: “Can a board gender quota ease financing frictions for female borrowers?”. Recent research highlights significant borrowing constraints faced by firms owned and managed by women. Urban’s project focuses on Italy's public banks to examine how a mandatory gender quota impacts lending to female-led firms. Using a triple-difference-in-differences design and micro-level data on bank loans and female firms, Daniel wants to investigate if the quota leads to increased lending to female firms relative to male-led firms. He will also provide insights into the mechanisms through which gender quotas affect lending to female firms. This is particularly relevant for the Netherlands with its recent gender quota and where female firms face significant barriers.