Berquist, Lauren Falcao, Benjamin Faber, Thibault Fally, Matthias Hoelzlein, Edward Miguel, Andres Rodriguez-Clare. (2026). “Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions”.

Policies to raise agricultural productivity have been central in the fight against global poverty. Their impacts are often measured in experiments that provide strong causal identification but may be too small-scale to capture general equilibrium effects that arise when policies are scaled up. We develop a quantitative model of agricultural trade, featuring a granular economic geography, that combines parameters estimated from small-scale experiments with rich administrative microdata to quantify how treatment effects change when policies are scaled up. Applying this framework to input subsidies in Uganda, we find that average welfare gains fall by about 20% when implemented at scale. However, gains increase among the poorest households, as returns shift from land to labor, reducing the regressivity of the intervention by more than half. We examine how these forces vary with household and market characteristics and the geographic scale of implementation, with implications for randomized saturation designs.