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Do larger interventions improve longer run outcomes more cost effectively? And should poverty traps motivate increasing intervention size? This paper considers two approaches to increasing intervention size in the context of temporary unconditional cash transfers - larger transfers (intensity), and adding complementary graduation program interventions (scope). It does so leveraging 38 experimental estimates of dynamic consumption impacts from 14 developing countries. First, increasing intensity decreases cost effectiveness and does not affect persistence of impacts. This result can be explained by poverty traps or decreasing marginal return on investment in a standard buffer stock model. Second, increasing scope increases impacts and persistence, but reduces cost effectiveness at commonly evaluated time horizons and increases heterogeneity. In summary, larger interventions need not have more persistent impacts, and when they do, this may come at the expense of cost effectiveness, and poverty traps are neither necessary nor sufficient for these results.

Access Of Poor To Social Services --- Beneficiary Targeting --- Cash Transfers --- Cost Effectiveness --- Graduation --- Household Consumption --- Inequality --- Intervention Design --- Long-Run Impact --- Poverty Impact Evaluation --- Poverty Reduction --- Poverty Trap --- Services and Transfers To Poor --- Social Protections and Assistance --- Social Protections and Labor

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This paper examines constraints to adoption of new technologies in the context of hillside irrigation schemes in Rwanda. It leverages a plot-level spatial regression discontinuity design to produce 3 key results. First, irrigation enables dry season horticultural production, which boosts on-farm cash profits by 70 percent. Second, adoption is constrained: access to irrigation causes farmers to substitute labor and inputs away from their other plots. Eliminating this substitution would increase adoption by at least 21 percent. Third, this substitution is largest for smaller households and wealthier households. This result can be explained by labor market failures in a standard agricultural household model.

Agricultural Sector Economics --- Agriculture --- Horticulture --- Irrigation --- Irrigation and Drainage --- Labor Market --- Labor Markets --- Market Failures --- Social Protections and Labor --- Technology Adoption --- Water Resources