Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Grain Bank Storage-Committee Turnover and Post-Harvest Distress Sales in Burkinabè Village Associations: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Rotation Eligibility Thresholds

The central problem is that committee rotation rules create eligibility thresholds—members become eligible for committee service only after holding a minimum share of grain deposits—and these thresholds may generate a discontinuity in the probability of turnover that can be exploited for causal inference. Because no observational data are available, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of the proposed RDD under a declared variance structure. A design and power analysis was conducted using a before-after-control-impact (BACI) estimator with an intraclass correlation of 0.64, between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, and residual standard deviation of 4.5. Power was estimated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24, and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5, and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 54 clusters would be required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power.