Urban Development Sociology of Metropolitan Property Rate Revaluation Appeals and Small Business Tenure Abandonment in Accra's Commercial Districts: A Bunching Estimation of Appeal Thresholds

The central problem is that bunching estimators, which infer behavioural responses from excess mass at a regulatory notch, have been developed almost entirely for continuous tax schedules and individual taxpayers, not for discrete tenure decisions made by small firms facing a local government appeal process with uncertain outcomes. The paper specifies a before-after-control-impact design with a declared variance structure (between-cluster standard deviation 6.0, residual standard deviation 4.5, intraclass correlation 0.64) and characterises its operating characteristics across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design achieves 80 per cent power at 5 percentage points with 50 clusters. Bunching at appeal thresholds is not a simple tax elasticity but a compound signal combining rate liability, procedural cost, tenure insecurity and the credibility of the appeal process. It proposes that the bunching estimator be reinterpreted as a measure of tenure abandonment rather than tax responsiveness, and it identifies the conditions under which the before-after-control-impact design can distinguish these interpretations. The contribution is a disciplined reframing of what a bunching estimate means when the decision margin is a lease renewal rather than a reported income.