Rural burial-society levy arrears and widows' customary land retention in Zambian chiefdoms: a regression-discontinuity analysis of funeral-notice contribution thresholds

The unresolved problem is that customary tenure scholarship treats widows' land access as a function of lineage politics and statutory overlay, while the everyday levy practices of burial societies have been left outside the analytic frame. Because no observational data are used or claimed, the analysis characterises the operating characteristics of the design under a declared variance structure: between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.640. 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 design attains 80% power at 52 clusters for a 5-percentage-point effect. The contribution is a falsifiable specification of how a funeral-notice threshold could bind widows' land claims, together with the design parameters a field study would need to detect it.