We provide new evidence of the heterogeneous impact of the Philippines' conditional cash transfer (CCT) program designed to improve human capital investments among children from poor households. Using a regression discontinuity design, our moderation analysis shows that the distance to and...

Key to achieving national targets under a devolved set-up is the capacity of the entire system to implement health and nutrition programs at scale. This requires coordinated efforts among the Local Government Units (LGUs) with the same energy and commitment. Though still few relative to the...

This study provides a systematic review and summary of the extant knowledge on the impacts of decentralization on health in the Philippines. Despite the country's twenty-five years of experience in decentralization, little is known about the topic. Overall, our survey shows that the existing...

The Philippine national government, through the Department of Health (DOH), has a long tradition of augmenting the supply of healthcare workers in underserved areas. Even with the adoption of the Local Government Code in 1991, which shifts the mandate of DOH from being the sole provider of...

We assess the short-term impacts of the Doctors-to-the-Barrios (DTTB), a national physician deployment program in the Philippines that augments the supply of rural healthcare workers in underserved areas, on several health sector outcomes. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that the...

This study provides a systematic review and summary of the extant knowledge on the impacts of decentralization on health in the Philippines. Despite the country's twenty-five years of experience in decentralization, little is known about the topic. Overall, our survey shows that the existing...

Sex-related risks, early sexual experience, and unwanted pregnancies are major concerns of Filipinos. These issues have long been battle grounds for the often rancorous debates about the provisions of the Reproductive Health (RH) Law. In December 2012, Congress approved a comprehensive RH Law...

The impact of sex education on various behavioral outcomes has been well studied in the literature. However, these studies fail to account for the simultaneity between knowledge demand and sexual behavior, leading to inconsistent effect estimates using simple comparison of means from randomized...

We trace the drivers of the Philippines' fertility decline over the last fifty years culminating in 2022 with a below-replacement 1.9 total fertility rate. Applying a modified Kitagawa-OaxacaBlinder decomposition on the combined experiences of about 65,000 married women in six rounds of the...