Thursday 21 November 2019 13:45 - 15:00

CKK 3.21, 3rd Floor, Cheng Kin Ku Building, LSE, 54 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3LJ

About this event

Interventions aimed at raising agricultural productivity in developing countries have been a centerpiece in the global fight against poverty. Much of the recent evidence in this space has been based on randomized control trials (RCTs), with the well-known limitation that findings from local interventions generally do not speak to the general equilibrium (GE) effects if the policy were to be scaled up. In this paper, we study these forces through the lens of a quantitative GE model of farm production and trade that we develop to capture several stylized facts in this setting. We propose a new solution approach in this environment that allows us to study high-dimensional GE counterfactuals at the level of individual households in the macroeconomy. We then bring to bear rich administrative microdata to calibrate the model to the roughly 6 million households populating Uganda. We use these building blocks to explore the average and distributional implications of small-scale interventions compared to policies at scale, and quantify the underlying mechanisms.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in CKK 3.21, 3rd Floor, Cheng Kin Ku Building, LSE, 54 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3LJ.

This series is part of the CEP's Growth programme.