The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a dramatic disruption in the delivery of education and health services in the Philippines. With school closures and challenges in the delivery of distance learning, students learning losses are expected to be enormous. Meanwhile, the health system...

Understanding health-seeking behaviors and their drivers is key for governments to manage health policies. There is a growing literature on the role of cognitive biases and heuristics in health and care-seeking behaviors, but little is known of how they might be influenced during a context of...

This paper evaluates the marginal propensity to consume out of the 2020 CARES Act stimulus payments using high-frequency, transaction-level data for a sample of low-income debit cardholders. It finds that spending responds less on impact to the stimulus payments than to non-stimulus income (15...

This paper proposes a package of policy reforms and a funding strategy to ensure that the Fund has the capacity to respond flexibly to LICs' needs during the pandemic and recovery. The key policy reforms proposed include: -- raising the normal annual/cumulative limits on access to PRGT resources...

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth disconnection-i.e., the share of young people who were neither in school nor at work. Youth disconnection offers important advantages, relative to unemployment or participation rates, as a measure of the labor market for the most...