Rural community grain-bank withdrawal rules and women's intra-household food allocation in Ethiopian woredas: a regression-discontinuity analysis of entitlement-tier thresholds

Community grain banks in rural Ethiopia allocate withdrawal entitlements through tiered eligibility rules that switch women between entitlement levels at fixed thresholds. The paper is methodological and conceptual: it specifies the running variable, the cutoff structure, the fuzzy assignment mechanism, the household-level food-allocation outcomes, and the assumptions required for a local average treatment effect interpretation. It also reports the distribution of a related real indicator, women's bank-account ownership from the Demographic and Health Surveys (N = 36 country-survey observations across 26 African countries, 2015-2025; mean 15.914, standard deviation 12.211), to establish the broader context of women's formal financial access within which grain-bank entitlement rules operate. The contribution is a transferable identification template for threshold-based entitlement rules in agrarian institutions, together with an explicit account of the household-bargaining mechanisms that make the design informative for food-allocation outcomes. Entitlement-tier discontinuities are a neglected source of quasi-experimental variation in studies of gendered food security, and that their credibility depends on distinguishing rule-based assignment from household selection into proximity to the threshold.