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...

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...

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...

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...

Housing is a basic need and is intricately connected to a household's health and wellness. The current pandemic has exposed the housing vulnerability for certain subgroups of the population and further jeopardized these household's health and stability. Using the Household Pulse Survey launched...

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated catastrophic job loss, high unemployment rates, and severe economic hardship in renter households. As a result, housing precarity and the risk of eviction increased and worsened during the pandemic, especially among people of color and low-income populations....