Who are we?

We are from the Carlos L. Tiu School of Economics.

1. Andrew Adrian Pua: Associate Professor
2. Lawrence B. Dacuycuy: Full Professor, formerly PES President
3. Ma. Isabel Fernandez: Assistant Professorial Lecturer, formerly Research Associate at Innovations for Poverty Action

Short-term goals

• To collaborate with BSP on joint sessions at conferences

  • Recent 62nd PES was a successful first step.

• To lay the foundations for name recall

  • Invited some BSP personnel to Dr. Tullao’s event celebrating his research

• To immediately move past any misunderstanding that may be disrupting the relationship between BSP and DLSU

  • Our meeting today is good progress in this direction.

Medium-term goals

• To deepen collaboration on joint sessions at conferences, seminars, and workshops

  • To give feedback to papers written by BSP staff (free reading!)
  • Can this be the start of writing papers together?

• To start identifying high-functioning teams by trial and error

  • DLSU personnel limited ultimately by the heavy teaching load and competing consultancy interests

Long-term goals

• To have sufficient regularity of high-quality research output

  • Want to make it worth everyone’s while
  • Q1 to Q2 type publications for DLSU

• To build high-functioning teams

  • What makes a team healthy and well-functioning?
  • Smoothen clearances by having enough “practice”

Who vets?

The CLTSOE has an internal Research Council composed of:

• Alellie Sobreviñas, Associate Dean for Research and Advanced Studies
• Arlene Inocencio, Dean
• Jesus Felipe, AKI Director
• Krista Yu, Full Professor
• Dickson Lim, Associate Professor

What does the approval process look like?

1. Each member of the council shall review the submitted proposal (and other supporting documents) and share comments.
2. Proponents make brief presentation and respond to the comments/questions of the council.
3. Incorporate revisions in the final version of the proposal.
4. Majority voting follows.

Potential routes

1. Demand-supply route

   • BSP identifies topics which interest their personnel.
   • DLSU matches with the most suitable faculty member(s) and/or student(s).
   • Try to achieve higher completion rate, higher incentive compatibility and mutual satisfaction
   • Concept note route: did not work last time

Potential routes

2. Mentorship program route

   • Match graduate students to selected mentors from both DLSU and BSP for their thesis or dissertation.
   • Design advertisement together with BSP, sign NDA, DLSU announces to students
   • An effort was made last year to have BSP personnel serve as members of an undergraduate thesis committee/panel: But this was not repeated.

Potential projects (not vetted yet!)

1. Building on Cebrero, Dacuycuy, Pua (2024)

2. About a month ago, I met with a team of BSP and DLSU personnel for brainstorming:

   • Are local government units “digitally ready” to blank?
   • FINDEX: pseudo panel type studies looking into transitions in and out of the “digital finance world”
   • PISA: cross-sectional or pseudo panel studies on digital thinking and financial literacy
   • Service fee differentials

Some boundaries to work out

Pays to be explicit and to revisit

1. Data access privileges, especially administrative data
2. Visitation rights
3. Funding mechanics: direct versus indirect

Questions from our end

1. What are your goals? Do we share the same goals?

2. Does DLSU have the capacity to help?

3. What are the distinctions (and the resulting implications) among independent, collaborative, and joint projects?

   • Note Section 1 of the BSP-DLSU MOU.

4. What made the MOU between BSP and ADMU bear fruit? What can we learn from their experience?

5. Hopefully, more to resolve as we discuss!