Rural cooperative tractor-hire scheduling queues and women's plot-preparation timeliness in Ethiopian woredas: a regression-discontinuity analysis of queue-position thresholds

Rural cooperative tractor-hire schemes in Ethiopian woredas allocate scarce mechanical power through scheduling queues whose ordering rules are rarely treated as sociologically consequential. Queue position operates as a temporal institution: the ordinal placement of a plot-preparation request within a cooperative's service roster encodes normative assumptions about whose agricultural time is fungible and whose is not, and these assumptions fall unevenly on women-headed plots. It does not report original estimates. Instead, it clarifies what a threshold-based analysis of scheduling queues can and cannot establish, distinguishes queue position from queue duration as distinct sociological mechanisms, and proposes that cooperative scheduling rules be studied as institutions that distribute temporal risk rather than as neutral administrative devices. The contribution is a specification of the mechanism connecting scheduling rules to gendered timeliness outcomes and a methodological argument for treating queue-position cut-offs as a credible source of identification in rural institutional research.