About

Thibault Fally is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His research interests include International Trade and Economic Development. He is based in Berkeley, California, where he is affiliated with the Giannini Hall at UC Berkeley. His contact email is fally@berkeley.edu, and his office is located at 207 Giannini Hall. His scholarly work focuses on issues related to international trade and economic development, contributing to the understanding of how trade policies and economic factors influence development outcomes.

Research topics

• Econometrics
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Microeconomics
• Computer Science
• Agricultural economics
• Mathematical optimization
• Statistics
• Demographic economics
• Macroeconomics
• Mathematical economics
• Economy
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions

  Repository@Nottingham (University of Nottingham) · 2025-04-01

  articleOpen access

  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 the general equilibrium effects that emerge once the policy is scaled up. We develop a quantitative model of agricultural trade, featuring a granular and realistic economic geography, that uses parameters estimated in small-scale experiments and combines them with rich administrative microdata to quantify how treatment effects change when policies are scaled up. Applying this approach to the context of input subsidies in Uganda, we find that average welfare gains fall by 20% when implemented at scale. Yet gains increase among the poorest households, as returns shift from land onto labor, reducing the regressivity of the local intervention by more than half. We explore how these forces depend on household and market characteristics and the geographical scale of implementation, with implications for randomized saturation designs.

  Publisher

• Measuring Welfare and Inequality with Incomplete Price Information

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2023 · 14 citations

  • Economics
  • Econometrics
  • Mathematics

  Abstract We propose and implement a new approach that allows us to estimate income-specific changes in household welfare in contexts where well-measured prices are not available for important subsets of consumption. Using rich but widely available expenditure survey microdata, we show that we can recover income-specific equivalent and compensating variations from horizontal shifts in what we call “relative Engel curves”—as long as preferences fall within the broad quasi-separable class (Gorman 1970, 1976). Our approach is flexible enough to allow for nonparametric estimation at each point of the income distribution. We apply the methodology to estimate inflation and welfare changes in rural India between 1987 and 2000. Our estimates reveal that lower rates of inflation for the rich erased the real income convergence found in the existing literature that uses the subset of consumption with well-measured prices to calculate inflation.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: "Measuring Welfare and Inequality with Incomplete Price Information"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-08-03 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access

  The programs replicate tables and figures from "Measuring Welfare and Inequality with Incomplete Price Information", by Atkin, Faber, Fally, and Gonzalez-Navarro. Please see the README file for additional details.

  PublisherDOI

• Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Generalized Separability and Integrability: Consumer Demand with a Price Aggregator

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-12-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access

  Policies aimed at raising agricultural productivity have been a centerpiece in the fight against global poverty. Their impacts are often measured using field or quasi-experiments that provide strong causal identification, but may be too small-scale to capture the general equilibrium (GE) effects that emerge once the policy is scaled up. We propose a new approach for quantifying large-scale GE policy counterfactuals that can both complement and be informed by evidence from field and quasi-experiments. We develop a quantitative model of farm production, consumption and trading that captures important features of this setting, and propose a new solution method that relies on rich but widely available microdata. We showcase our approach in the context of a subsidy for modern inputs in Uganda, using variation from field and quasiexperiments for parameter estimation. We find that both the average and distributional impacts of the subsidy differ meaningfully when comparing a local intervention to one at scale, even for the same sample of farmers, and quantify the underlying mechanisms. We further document new insights on how GE forces differ as a function of saturation rates at different geographical scales, and on the importance of capturing a granular economic geography for counterfactual analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Generalized separability and integrability: Consumer demand with a price aggregator

  Journal of Economic Theory · 2022 · 26 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Econometrics
  PublisherDOI

• Generalized Separability and Integrability: Consumer Demand with a Price Aggregator

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-04-01

  report1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Per capita income and the demand for skills

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2021-03-01 · 6 citations

  book-chapter

  Almost all of the literature about the growth of income inequaility and the relationship between skilled and unskilled wages approaches the issue from the production side of general equilibrium (skill-biased technical change, international trade). We add a role for income-dependent demand interacted with factor intensities in production. We explore how income growth and trade liberalization influence the demand for skilled labor when preferences are non-homothetic and when income-elastic goods are more intensive in skilled labor, an empirical regularity documented in Caron et al. (2014). To do so, we simulate the growth in both income and exports observed between 1995 and 2010 by adjusting sector-neutral productivity and trade costs. Relative to what we would obtain with homothetic preferences, we show that these changes lead to significant increases in the skill premium, especially in developing countries. Our results are mostly driven by productivity growth shifting consumption towards skill-intensive goods, but non-homothetic preferences also matter when evaluating the effect of trade. Overall, the negative effect of trade cost reductions on the skill premium predicted for developing countries under homothetic preferences (Stolper-Samuelson) is strongly mitigated, and sometimes reversed.

  PublisherDOI

• INTERNATIONAL TRADE PUZZLES: A SOLUTION LINKING PRODUCTION AND PREFERENCES

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2021-03-01 · 5 citations

  book-chapter

  International trade literature tends to focus heavily on the production side of general equilibrium, leaving us with a number of empirical puzzles. There is, for example, considerably less world trade than predicted by Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) models. Trade among rich countries is higher and trade between rich and poor countries lower than suggested by HOV and other supply-driven theories, and trade-to-GDP ratios are higher in rich countries. Our approach focuses on the relationship between characteristics of goods and services in production and characteristics of preferences. In particular, we find a strong and significant positive correlation of more than 45% between a good’s skilled-labor intensity and its income elasticity, even when accounting for trade costs and cross-country price differences. Exploring the implications of this correlation for empirical trade puzzles, we find that it can reduce HOV’s overprediction of the variance of the net factor content of trade relative to that in the data by about 60%. Since rich countries are relatively skilled-labor abundant, they are relatively specialized in consuming the same goods and services that they are specialized in producing, and so trade more with one another than with poor countries. We also find a positive sector-level correlation between income elasticity and a sector’s tradability, which helps explain the higher trade-to-GDP ratios in high-income relative to low-income countries.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Russell Hillberry

  Purdue University System

  46 shared

• Juan Carluccio

  32 shared

• Benjamin Faber

  University of California, Berkeley

  16 shared

• Justin Caron

  HEC Montréal

  15 shared

• Philippe Aghion

  Collège de France

  12 shared

• James R. Markusen

  11 shared

• Marco Gonzalez-Navarro

  11 shared

• Stéfano Scarpetta

  9 shared