Rural Savings-Group Payout Rotation Order and Interdisciplinary Sociology of Intra-Household Consumption Smoothing in Ugandan Villages: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Queuing Thresholds

The central problem is that ROSCA scholarship has treated payout order as an allocation rule with distributional consequences, while household economics has treated consumption smoothing as a function of income shocks and bargaining power, leaving the queuing threshold itself unexamined as a mechanism. It formalises the threshold as a discontinuity in the timing of liquidity access, and specifies how the resulting variation in payout timing can be used to identify effects on consumption smoothing, intra-household allocation, and bargaining outcomes. The framework integrates sociological accounts of ROSCA governance with economic models of intertemporal choice and household bargaining, and it specifies the assumptions, estimands, and falsification tests required for credible inference. The contribution is a discipline-aware design that treats the queuing threshold as the unit of analysis, rather than the group or the household, and that makes explicit the conditions under which payout order can be interpreted as a causal mechanism. The paper concludes by identifying the boundary conditions under which the design is informative and the threats to inference that arise from endogenous group formation and attrition.