Comment on "Diffusion of Reproductive Health Behavior through International Migration: Effects on Origin-Country Fertility"
Godlonton and Theoharides (2025) argue that Filipino migrants’ exposure to more liberal reproductive health policies reduces origin-community fertility. This comment shows that the differential effect they present is insufficient to conclude that more liberal policies significantly reduce fertility at origin—on average or in any single province. These claims require estimates of average or province-specific effects, but neither the article nor the replication files include information to recover them. The Authors declined our requests to share portions of the analysis data at the province-year level or information on a key coefficient estimated by their code but left unreported. We overcome this otherwise binding data constraint using information from their working paper. We show that the average effect is far from significant (|t-stat| ≤ 0.86), and that the province-specific effect may be negative and significant for as few as one out of 84 provinces. This occurs even though the differential effect is negative and highly statistically significant, as in Godlonton and Theoharides (2025).
This paper received a response:
Godlonton, S., S. Theoharides. 2026. Response to Comment from Bertoli and Gazeaud on "Diffusion of Reproductive Health Behavior through International Migration: Effects on Origin-Country Fertility". I4R Discussion Paper Series No. 328. Institute for Replication.