Rural development cooperative grain-reserve release rules and women's distress-sale avoidance in Niger: a difference-in-differences analysis of reserve-stock thresholds

Cooperative grain reserves in the Sahel are intended to break the seasonal link between household need and distress sale of assets, yet the release rules that govern them are written as stock thresholds rather than as household-need criteria. The design treats the threshold as the assignment variable, defines treatment as residence in a village whose cooperative crosses the release threshold during the lean season, and specifies the parallel-trends assumption against pre-lean-season sale behaviour. Because no primary survey data are supplied, the paper is a methodological and conceptual contribution: it specifies the estimand, the identifying assumptions, the threats to identification and the data that would be required to estimate the effect. To anchor the design in measurable quantities, the paper draws on the DHS Program indicator 'Age difference between man and woman is 10+ years' (MA_ADIF_W_O10), covering 36 African countries and 135 country-survey observations between 1994 and 2025, with a mean of 32.358 and a standard deviation of 15.598. Threshold-based release rules create a discontinuity in access that is analytically separable from need, and that this separation is what makes credible estimation possible. The contribution is a design that can be executed when cooperative stock records and household sale diaries become available, together with an explicit statement of the conditions under which the design would fail.