Mobile-money agents in Ghanaian rural markets must rebalance their cash and electronic float when either side approaches a threshold, and the delay between a threshold breach and a completed rebalancing constrains the working capital available to women traders who depend on agent cash-out. It treats float rebalancing delay as a structural feature of the agent network rather than an idiosyncratic service failure, and it specifies an instrumental-variable strategy that uses exogenous variation in agent float thresholds to identify the effect of rebalancing delay on traders' working-capital liquidity. The framework distinguishes three mechanisms: cash-out deferral, precautionary balance-holding, and association-mediated credit substitution. It also specifies the conditions under which each mechanism is identifiable and the threats to inference that arise from endogenous agent placement and from traders' anticipatory behaviour. It does not report empirical estimates; it reports the analytical structure that such estimates would require.
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Bonsu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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