Interdisciplinary Urban Development Sociology of Municipal Cemetery Plot Allocation Waiting Lists and Household Burial Site Substitution in Lagos's Peri-Urban Wards: A Bunching Estimation of Queue Thresholds

Municipal cemetery systems in rapidly urbanising African cities allocate scarce plots through waiting lists whose administrative thresholds are rarely analysed as behavioural parameters. The framework treats the administrative waiting-list cutoff as a notch that generates excess mass in the distribution of queue durations, and it links that excess mass to household decisions to substitute alternative burial sites when the expected wait exceeds a household-specific reservation threshold. Because no plot-allocation microdata are available for Lagos, the paper specifies the estimator, states its identifying assumptions, and calibrates the bunching window using the DHS Program indicator 'Children under five living in households using adequately iodized salt' (id CN_MIAC_C_IOD) across 31 African countries and 58 country-survey observations from 2010 to 2024, which serves here as a methodological illustration of distributional shape rather than as a substantive finding about cemetery queues. The calibrated distribution has a mean of 80.559 and a standard deviation of 20.146, with country values ranging from 20.30 in Mauritania to 99.60 in Kenya.