Funeral-insurance cooperatives in rural Uganda tie burial support to premium contributions, and contribution arrears thresholds are widely used to determine benefit eligibility. Whether crossing such a threshold also affects widows' retention of land tenure is an open question that existing observational data cannot answer, because arrears and tenure are jointly determined by household vulnerability. the present analysis treats the threshold as a regression-discontinuity design problem and characterises the operating characteristics of the before-after-control-impact estimator that such a design would require. Using a declared variance structure with between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5 and intraclass correlation = 0.64, power was estimated across 2000 design cells spanning 8, 16, 24 and 32 clusters and effects of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points.52 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power, that minimum detectable effects fall steeply as clusters increase from 8 to 32, and that the estimator's confidence intervals widen sharply at small cluster counts. The contribution is a design protocol and a set of power benchmarks that specify what a credible threshold-based study of widows' land tenure in Uganda would require before fieldwork begins.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Ssemakula et al. (2026) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: