Rural development cooperative pesticide-safety training mandates and women's cotton-grading income in Benin: a regression-discontinuity analysis of membership-size thresholds

The central problem is that cooperative membership-size thresholds determine which cooperatives fall under mandatory training rules, yet the income consequences for women graders remain unquantified because no credible counterfactual has been specified. The paper formalises the institutional rule as a sharp threshold in cooperative membership size, derives the identifying assumptions required for a local average treatment effect at that threshold, and specifies the estimation and validation strategy. It then situates the design within the broader evidence on cooperative governance, pesticide regulation and gendered agricultural labour in West Africa. The contribution is methodological and institutional: a replicable identification strategy for a class of cooperative regulations that are assigned by size thresholds, together with an explicit account of the threats to validity that such thresholds generate. The paper does not report estimates; it specifies what would be estimated, from which data, and under which assumptions. The conclusion argues that threshold-assigned cooperative rules are a neglected source of quasi-experimental variation and that exploiting them requires attention to manipulation, covariate balance and the local nature of the estimand.