Rural development cooperative warehouse-receipt e-pledge registries and smallholder collateral disputes in Ethiopia: an event-study of electronic-lien registration thresholds

Electronic warehouse-receipt pledge registries in Ethiopian rural cooperatives are intended to let smallholders borrow against stored grain, but the legal force of a registered lien depends on whether the registry records the pledge before competing claims attach to the same collateral. the present analysis treats the registration threshold as a design parameter rather than an administrative detail and characterises the operating characteristics of a before-after-control-impact estimator for evaluating threshold effects. No observational data are used or claimed. Under a declared variance structure with between-cluster standard deviation 6.0, residual standard deviation 4.5 and intraclass correlation 0.64, 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 requires 52 clusters to detect a 5 percentage point reduction in collateral disputes at 80 per cent power. The credibility of e-pledge evaluations depends less on the sophistication of the estimator than on whether the cluster count is large enough to separate registration-threshold effects from cooperative-level heterogeneity, and it specifies the conditions under which event-study designs can support causal claims about lien priority.