The central problem is that waiver schedules are means-tested against a proxy-means threshold, yet the behavioural response of households near that threshold has not been theorised in a way that connects urban sociology's concerns with legibility, tenure security and state recognition to the identification logic of regression discontinuity designs. Address registration withdrawal is not a simple price response but a socially embedded reaction to the categorical boundary itself: households just above the waiver threshold face a discontinuous jump in the cost of formal address, and their withdrawal behaviour should be understood as a threshold-induced exit from the registration contract rather than a gradual decline in demand. The framework specifies the running variable, the cutoff, the bandwidth, the local linear estimator and the compliance conditions under which a sharp or fuzzy discontinuity would identify a causal effect. It further specifies how the design would be executed using administrative registration records from mapped wards, with the waiver eligibility score as the running variable and withdrawal within twelve months as the outcome. No empirical estimates are reported; the contribution is the articulation of a testable design that links the sociology of informal settlement address formalisation to the econometric logic of threshold identification, and the derivation of propositions about the direction and heterogeneity of the expected discontinuity. The paper concludes that the waiver threshold is best understood as an instrument of urban social policy whose behavioural consequences are concentrated precisely at the point where eligibility changes, and that this concentration is what makes the regression discontinuity design both feasible and sociologically informative.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Kirui et al. (2026) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: