Veni grants for Joost van de Brake and Daniel te Kaat

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has decided to award Veni grants to Joost van de Brake and Daniel te Kaat. The grants are in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW).

Multiple Teams Membership

Van de Brake received the grant for his research project on multiple team membership. “Many people work in multiple teams at the same time. Yet we know surprisingly little about the consequences of this work practice for employee wellbeing and performance. The proposed project examines why and when working in multiple teams has positive or negative consequences for individuals and entire teams. In doing so, I will not only look at the total number of teams in which a person is active, but also examine how these teams differ from each other.”

“I am very excited about this opportunity. In the upcoming three years, I will test the framework outlined in my proposal by examining real work teams embedded in multiple team membership (MTM)-intensive organizations as well as by experiments. I hope to fundamentally advance the MTM literature by both systematically organizing different MTM conceptualizations that can be used in present and future research and by explaining MTM’s potentially inconsistent implications for teams and individuals.”

Unconventional monetary policy transmission

Te Kaat received his grant for his research of central banks’ unconventional monetary policy transmission outside the credit market through a household portfolio rebalancing channel. “Unconventional monetary policy makes holding bonds and deposits less attractive because it reduces interest rates. Households, mainly wealthy ones, therefore rebalance their portfolios towards housing – an investment with higher returns. This, in turn, pushes up house prices. As households have to buy houses at an elevated price, future housing returns are lower and drive down the aggregate portfolio return, as housing has a large weight in households’ wealth. The return on savings is low and this, finally, leads people to consume a larger part of their income, which increases economic growth.”

His research will contribute significantly to the understanding of monetary policy transmission in economies with flat or declining credit volumes and will also deliver important insights regarding the redistributive effects of monetary policy across households.

Plans

Te Kaat is excited about the possibilities the grant offers for his research. “Going forward, I will construct a large European cross-country household-level data set. I will use the data set to empirically identify the extent to which non-conventional monetary policy affects household consumption through changes in household portfolios, and whether and why this effect differs across countries. In order to promote dissemination of my research results, I will present my work at renowned international conferences and at central banks – the main knowledge users of my research. Finally, I will organize a conference on the transmission of non-conventional monetary policy through household portfolios at the University of Groningen in 2023. This conference will not only stimulate discussions, but also potentially set the course for further collaborations in this research field.”

For more information, please contact Joost van de Brake or Daniel te Kaat.