Quiver Grassmannians and degenerate flag varieties

Quiver Grassmannians are varieties parametrizing subrepresentations of a quiver representation. It is observed that certain quiver Grassmannians for type A quivers are isomorphic to the degenerate flag varieties investigated earlier by the second named author. This leads to the consideration of a class of Grassmannians of subrepresentations of the direct sum of a projective and an injective representation of a Dynkin quiver. It is proven that these are (typically singular) irreducible normal local complete intersection varieties, which admit a group action with finitely many orbits, and a cellular decomposition. For type A quivers explicit formulas for the Euler characteristic (the median Genocchi numbers) and the Poincare polynomials are derived.