Rural grain-bank storage rules and women's market-timing leverage in Sahelian cooperatives: a regression-discontinuity analysis of warehouse-receipt thresholds

Sahelian grain banks commonly tie access to storage, credit and price information to a warehouse-receipt threshold, yet the gendered consequences of where that threshold is set remain poorly specified. The indicator has a mean of 15.914 and a standard deviation of 12.211, ranging from 2.90 in Congo Democratic Republic to 53.90 in South Africa. Receipt thresholds function as institutional rationing devices whose effects on women's market timing are discontinuous, and that a sharp design around the threshold can identify the local average treatment effect of receipt eligibility on sale timing, storage duration and price realisation. The contribution is a transferable identification strategy and a set of testable propositions linking cooperative storage rules to gendered market leverage, not a report of estimated programme effects. The design requires receipt-level administrative data and household sale records that the present analysis does not possess; the paper therefore specifies the data, the running variable, the bandwidth logic and the threats to validity that a full evaluation would need to address.