NWO XS grants for Agnieszka Postepska and Maria Cristina Sestu

The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) is happy to announce that FEB researchers Agnieszka Postepska and Maria Cristina Sestu have each received a grant of € 50,000 from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for new research projects. Agnieszka Postepska’s project focuses on the physiological and economic toll of armed conflicts and Maria Cristina Sestu’s project focuses on joint venture success and the fit between controlling owners.   

Studying the hidden costs of war

Agnieszka Postepska, associate professor at FEB’s Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance, received the grant for her project titled ‘The Hidden Costs of War: A Data Driven Study of Physiological and Economic Toll of Armed Conflicts’. Postepska’s project aims to estimate the hidden health and economic costs of war. The conflict in Ukraine has exposed millions to significant stressors - from air raid alarms, explosions, to shortages of water and electricity. These conditions are psychologically devastating and can trigger biological changes, affecting inflammation, metabolism, and cardiovascular health. Despite the well-documented effects of stress on the human body, no large-scale study has examined how war shapes population health. Postepska’s project will be the first to leverage large medical data to uncover the effects of direct exposure to conflict on health and to determine who is most vulnerable.

Improving the understanding of joint ventures

Maria Cristina Sestu, assistant professor at FEB’s Department of Global Economics & Management, received the grant for her project titled ‘Joint venture success and controlling owner fit’. Joint ventures (JVs) are known to have a high failure rate. Some crucial aspects that possibly play a role in this low success rate have been ignored so far. With her project, Sestu aims to improve understanding of JVs by adopting a new perspective—that of the fit between the type of partner owners and their culture. She expects JVs between firms of the same owner type, for example families, the state, or institutional investors, and of similar culture, to be more successful. Sestu hopes the project will lead to a new research stream showing whether and how the fit of different partner owner characteristics may improve JV success.

The NWO Open Competition

With the NWO Open Competition-SSH, NWO Social Sciences and Humanities wants to offer researchers the opportunity to carry out research into a subject of their own choosing without any thematic constraints. The aim is to facilitate excellent, non-programmed, curiosity-driven projects by researchers in different stages of their academic careers. The focus is on research that primarily addresses a social sciences or humanities research question and research problem. The SSH Open Competition XS is specifically intended to encourage innovative research that involves the relatively rapid exploration of a promising idea.