protection programs might also be larger in pandemic times.<sup>3</sup> However, Banerjee et al. (2020) report finding similar estimates when they compare the effects of cash on mental health before the pandemic to effects during the pandemic. Alloush et al. (2022), which studies a nation-wide government program like we do (as opposed to a researcher-driven RCT as in Banerjee et al. (2020)), concludes that effects on psychological distress are at least as large, and possibly larger, in pandemic times.

In this paper, we ask whether social protection matters more for mental health during a pandemic – a question for which theoretical predictions are ambiguous and empirical evidence is scant. We use data from the Philippines, where the government imposed strict quarantine measures and rolled out a large emergency cash transfer program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are interested in the importance of the pre-existing Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (commonly known as the “4Ps”), a national conditional cash transfer (CCT) program that distributes money to households who satisfy various education and health requirements.

Using a panel survey of low-income households who were just below and just above the poverty score cutoff used to determine 4Ps eligibility, we compare depression rates for 4Ps beneficiaries and for non-4Ps beneficiaries both before and during the pandemic. We find that rates of severe depression were similar for both groups prior to the pandemic (around 1%), but significantly lower for 4Ps beneficiaries as of July 2020. While depression increased for both groups, it increased substantially more for non-4Ps households (33 percentage points) than 4Ps households (23 percentage points). This is in spite of the more generous emergency cash transfers that were distributed to both groups.

That a large difference between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries emerged only during the pandemic could be an indication that the existing 4Ps program mattered more for mental health in crisis than non-crisis times. However, there could be other explanations for the larger increase in depression rates for non-4Ps compared to 4Ps households, which we explore and rule out. First, it is not the case that differences in baseline household characteristics between 4Ps and non-4Ps led to differential trends in depression rates over the study period. Second, the two groups seemed to have been affected similarly by the pandemic in terms of the economic outcomes we are able to measure – employment, income, and informal transfers. Moreover, the two groups were located in similar areas and therefore had similar exposure to province-specific quarantine measures. The incidence of illness was also similar across the two groups. Given this, we interpret our main finding – the emergence of a gap between 4Ps and non-4Ps households’ depression rates during the pandemic – as evidence that the 4Ps program became more important for mental health during crisis.

One interpretation of these results is that the bimonthly CCTs distributed to the 4Ps beneficiaries (for

> 3A related paper, which only examines food security and not mental health, finds that Ethiopia’s flagship food security program helped protect households from large increases in food insecurity during the early months of the pandemic (Abay et al., 2023), which is consistent with social protection becoming more important for food security during crisis times.

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