Commodity market fluctuations have been linked with a number of adult outcomes. Recent evidence on the lasting impact of early life conditions, however, suggests that the effects on children may be important as well. Using large spatio-temporal variations in rice prices in the Philippines as a...

Despite the Philippines’ sustained economic growth, persistently high malnutrition remains to be a significant issue in the country, especially in a number of subnational regions. This clearly illustrates the urgent need to examine the formulation and delivery of health and nutrition...

The Philippines recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provides conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enrolls them into the government's social health insurance program. This has resulted to...

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...

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...

Which children benefit from conditional cash transfers (CCT)? Using a sample of poor and near-poor households in the Philippines, we show that children in households that receive cash transfers from 4Ps, the country's flagship anti-poverty program, have parents with relatively low educational...