“Obeying in Advance: Duterte’s Election and the Onset of the Philippine Drug War”

HAPPENING NEXT FRIDAY, May 8, 2026. 4:00 PM, at the Judith R. Duavit-Vazquez and Class of 1984 Lecture Room (UPSE 105)

🎓 UPSE-PCED Friday Seminar, featuring UPSE Asst. Prof. JC Punongbayan, Ph.D., whose research covers macroeconomics, economic history, education, and development. He has authored two books: False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them, published in 2023 by Ateneo Press and Twin Plagues: How Duterte and Covid-19 Wrecked the Philippine Economy, which will be published by Penguin Books SEA in June 2026. In 2024, he received The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award for Economics.

🧠📚💡Abstract: I use event-level data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) to estimate the impact of Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” on political violence in the Philippines. Constructing a balanced panel of 80 provinces observed weekly from January 2016 through June 2017, I estimate event-study and difference-in-differences models that compare drug-war-tagged fatalities against a within-country placebo: non-drug-war political violence (battles, explosions, and non-drug violence against civilians).

The headline finding is that the placebo series exhibits no discontinuity around either the election or the inauguration, while drug-war fatalities show a sharp, immediate spike. The violence increase is therefore specific to the drug war, rather than reflecting general conflict trends, ACLED source-coverage changes, or other simultaneous shocks. As a precondition for this comparison, I show that the relevant event date is the May 9 presidential election, not the June 30 inauguration. I discuss identification challenges, including anticipation effects, the endogeneity of ACLED’s tagging, and the absence of cross-regional treatment variation.

📝 Please register using the links below or by scanning the QR codes in the poster:
📍 Onsite: https://tinyurl.com/35nbv3xf
Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/34v83ff3

👀 We’d love to see you there!

Source: UP School of Economics Facebook