When the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program was designed, the government publicly promised to limit to five years the giving of the education and health grants. This five-year limit is almost over for the first set of beneficiaries by 2013. The natural policy question then is: Would it be wise...

The year 2013 marks the fifth year of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) implementation in the country since its inception in 2008. The first batch of beneficiaries will be graduating from the program in several months' time. Meanwhile, the government continues to expand the...

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program has been much maligned and dismissed as a "dole-out" program. Critics have focused on the fact that it provides cash grants directly to poor families, believing it would promote the culture of mendicancy and dependence. Others believe that the grants would...

This study evaluates the impact of Microenterprise Development (MD) assistance on the labor supply, income, expenditure, savings, and capital investment of beneficiaries of Pantawid Pamilya, the Philippine government's conditional cash transfers (CCT) program. The assistance is provided by the...

Proximity augments homeless students' educational outcomes. Homeless K-8 graders whose families are placed in shelters near their schools have 8 percent (2.4 days) better attendance, are a third (18 percentage points) less likely to change schools, and exhibit higher rates of proficiency and...

Using an original administrative dataset in the context of a scarcity induced-natural experi-ment in New York City, I find that families placed in shelters in their neighborhoods of origin remain there considerably longer than those assigned to distant shelters. Locally-placed families also...