Rural Sociology of Village Savings Group Loan Repayment Grace Period Rules and Member Exit Timing in Ghanaian Rural Associations: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Grace Thresholds

Village savings groups in rural Ghana typically embed a repayment grace period before which a member may exit without penalty and after which exit triggers social and financial sanctions. the present analysis treats the grace period as a threshold rule and asks whether exit timing responds discontinuously to it. Because no field data are available, the study characterises the operating characteristics of a regression discontinuity design that would estimate the effect of crossing the grace threshold on exit timing. Using a before-after-control-impact estimator with a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), power was estimated across 2000 design cells for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 52 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power. The grace period is a sociologically meaningful institution whose threshold logic is amenable to causal identification, and it specifies the design conditions under which that identification would be credible.