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Description: Scholars have long argued for the central role of agency in the human experience. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of agency in shaping people’s patience and risk tolerance. We focus on the context of resource scarcity, which has been associated with both impatience and a lack of agency. Using data from a representative sample of over 86,000 individuals worldwide and two experiments, we replicate the decrease in patience among those exposed to scarcity. However, we show that endowing individuals with agency over scarcity fully moderates this effect, increasing patience substantially. We further show that agency’s impact on patience is partly driven by greater risk tolerance. These results hold even though individuals with greater agency do not exercise it; simply knowing one could alleviate one’s scarcity is sufficient to change behavior. Finally, we demonstrate that these effects of agency generalize beyond scarcity, highlighting the potential for agency-based policy and institutional design.