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 Feigin. 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 proved 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 Poincaré polynomials are derived.