Rural Credit Cooperative Membership and Off-Farm Enterprise Entry Among Ghanaian Youth: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Eligibility Thresholds and Household Welfare Consequences

The central problem is that cooperative eligibility rules create a sharp discontinuity in access to credit at a defined threshold, yet the causal effect of crossing that threshold on enterprise entry and welfare remains poorly identified in the African rural finance literature. The paper specifies the identification assumptions, the running variable, the bandwidth selection procedure and the local polynomial estimator required to recover the threshold effect, and it derives the welfare accounting framework that links enterprise entry to household consumption and asset accumulation. The design is framed as a proposed empirical strategy rather than an executed analysis; no primary data were collected and no estimates are reported. The contribution is methodological and conceptual: it clarifies how the eligibility discontinuity can be exploited for credible inference, identifies the threats to identification specific to cooperative membership rules, and specifies the welfare metrics that would make the analysis policy-relevant. The paper concludes that the regression discontinuity approach offers a defensible route to causal evidence on rural credit cooperative membership, provided that eligibility rules are verified, manipulation is ruled out and the welfare accounting is specified in advance.