“Big push” interventions are commonly proposed to generate significant, sustained increases in household, community, and national income (Banerjee et al. 2020; Kraay and McKenzie 2014).

At the household level, two approaches to increasing intervention size may––in theory––enable households to escape poverty traps and produce persistent decreases in poverty (Ghatak 2015): 1. When households are in a “scarcity poverty trap,” increasing the intensity (cash transfer size) of interventions can push households over a poverty threshold; 2. Alternatively, when households face “frictional poverty traps” (facing many obstacles), increasing the scope (adding complementary interventions to create multi-faceted programs) of interventions can enable households to overcome multiple... Read More