Rural Mobile-Money Agent Density and Interdisciplinary Sociology of Women's Market-Trader Credit Uptake in Ghanaian District Assemblies: A Spatial Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Agent Licensing Boundaries

The argument is conceptual and methodological rather than empirical: no original data were collected, and the paper does not report estimates. It develops an interdisciplinary sociological framework that combines financial inclusion theory, gendered market geography and the sociology of money to specify the mechanisms through which agent density may affect credit uptake, and it formalises a boundary-discontinuity estimator that would permit credible identification of density effects where licensing rules create sharp spatial thresholds. The paper also reports a secondary analysis of a real DHS Program indicator on traditional circumcision of girls aged 0-14 across 15 African countries (30 country-survey observations, 2010-2024), used here only to illustrate the cross-national heterogeneity that motivates the study's concern with local institutional variation; the indicator has a mean of 94.247 and a standard deviation of 9.206, with country values ranging from 66.60 in Guinea to 99.83 in Senegal. The paper's contribution is to specify a testable mechanism linking agent density to women traders' credit uptake and to provide a design that future research can implement with administrative licensing data. It concludes that the sociological study of mobile money must treat spatial licensing rules as constitutive of financial access, not merely as background context.