The team behind PhilDIGITS

Cesi Cruz is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics at the University of Michigan. Cesi is a board member of Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC), and serves on the executive board of Women Also Know Stuff.

Rogelio Alicor L. Panao is Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. He finished his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Master of Industrial Relations degrees in UP Diliman. He would later earn another Master’s degree in Public Administration, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Arts and Science Program) with Political Science as area specialization, from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. His doctoral dissertation titled “Beyond roll calls: Bill authorship and executive-legislative dynamics in the Philippine House of Representatives” examines how the Philippine executive dominates legislative policymaking as an agenda-setter through the exercise of constitutional and residual powers. His research interests are legislative politics, Philippine executive-legislative relations, labor economics, and political economy.

José Gloria is a political economist and PhD Candidate at UCLA. He has lived and worked across Canada, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and now based in the United States. He has consulted for the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank on development and data projects in the Philippines and Mexico. His research focuses on the political economy of elite power, particularly how elite networks and production structures shape economic development in the Philippines and Latin America. His most recent work appeared in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and he is currently helping lead the development of the DIGITS Data Lab at the University of the Philippines - Diliman, which supports research on governance and development in the Philippines.

Blaine Finstein is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at UCLA. His research focuses on the political economy of development, public resource allocation, and applications of computational tools to social science. He has held a number of roles spanning aid research and practice at the World Bank, International Rescue Committee, and Peace Corps Philippines, where he developed remedial reading programming in Roxas City, Western Visayas.