Dental Hygiene Out-of-Pocket Price Bands and Preventive Visit Foregone Care in Ugandan Households: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Fee Exemption Thresholds

Uganda's dental hygiene fee schedule creates discrete out-of-pocket price bands at which households become eligible for preventive-care exemptions, yet the behavioural effect of crossing those thresholds has not been isolated from the income gradient that generates them. Because no household-level utilisation data are available for this run, the paper is framed as a methodological and policy-analytic contribution: it derives the estimand, formalises the running variable and cutoff structure, and sets out the falsification tests that a future implementation would need to pass. The design is calibrated against the DHS Program survey indicator 'Wife's earns relative to husbands: Total' (id EM_RERN_W_TOT), which supplies 81 country-survey observations across 33 African countries from 2005 to 2024, with a mean of 100.0 and a standard deviation of 0.0. That indicator is used only to illustrate the distributional structure that a household running variable would need to resemble; it is not a dental utilisation measure. Threshold-based exemptions can be evaluated credibly only when the price band, the running variable and the manipulation margin are specified jointly, and it identifies the conditions under which a discontinuity design would and would not recover a policy-relevant price effect.