Rural grain-bank default adjudication and women's market-entry decisions in Ethiopian peasant associations: a regression-discontinuity analysis of repayment-threshold enforcement

Grain banks in Ethiopian peasant associations operate a repayment rule that converts a shortfall above a fixed threshold into formal default, and default carries consequences that reach beyond the loan itself into a household's capacity to enter produce markets. The framework is specified for a running variable measured as the ratio of repaid grain to the contracted obligation, a cutoff at unity, and a fuzzy first stage in which adjudication committees exercise discretion near the boundary. Because no primary data were collected for the present analysis, the design is presented as a proposed identification strategy rather than an executed analysis; the empirical illustration uses the DHS Program indicator 'Women who have a bank account' (id CO_MOBB_W_BNK), 26 African countries, 2015-2025, 36 country-survey observations, with mean 15.914 and standard deviation 12.211. Threshold-based default adjudication creates a discontinuity in women's market access that conventional repayment regressions cannot recover, and it specifies the assumptions, estimands and falsification tests that a field implementation would require.