Rural teacher deployment formulas and girls' secondary completion in Malawian districts: a regression-discontinuity analysis of staffing-quota thresholds

Malawi's rural teacher deployment formula allocates posts to districts through staffing-quota thresholds, and a regression-discontinuity design around those thresholds has been proposed as a way to identify the effect of additional teachers on girls' secondary completion. the present analysis characterises the operating characteristics of that design before any observational data are collected. 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 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points.54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power, that the minimum detectable effect at 80% power falls steeply as clusters increase from 8 to 32, and that the intraclass correlation of 0.64 dominates the variance budget. The contribution is a design-based benchmark: it establishes the cluster counts at which a threshold-based evaluation of teacher deployment can credibly detect policy-relevant effects on girls' completion, and it identifies the conditions under which the design cannot.