Rural development cooperative cremation-fee assistance rules and widows' garden-plot tenure in Kenya: a regression-discontinuity analysis of burial-society contribution thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Kenya increasingly administer cremation-fee assistance through burial societies whose contribution schedules determine eligibility for bereavement support. Whether such thresholds also condition widows' security of garden-plot tenure is a question that regression-discontinuity designs are well suited to answer, yet the credibility of any such study depends on design operating characteristics that are rarely reported before fieldwork. the present analysis characterises the power of a before-after-control-impact regression-discontinuity design 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 achieved 80 per cent power at 54 clusters for a 5-percentage-point effect. The results indicate that the minimum detectable effect at 80 per cent power falls steeply as clusters increase from 8 to 32, and that the estimate distribution widens accordingly. Pre-fieldwork design characterisation of this kind should be a reporting requirement for regression-discontinuity studies of cooperative bereavement rules, because the credibility of a null finding depends on the design's capacity to detect a substantively meaningful threshold effect.