Rural development cooperative funeral-savings payout rules and widows' land-lease retention in Zambia: a regression-discontinuity analysis of bereavement-grant eligibility thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Zambia increasingly tie funeral-savings payouts to eligibility thresholds, and widows' decisions to retain leased land may shift discontinuously at those thresholds. No observational data are used or claimed: the analysis characterises the operating characteristics of the design under a declared variance structure with between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5 and intraclass correlation = 0.640. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells spanning cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80% power, and that power falls sharply below that threshold. The regression-discontinuity design is feasible for cooperative-level bereavement-grant evaluation only when the number of cooperatives is large relative to the effect size of interest, and it specifies the boundary conditions under which threshold-based identification of widows' land-lease retention is defensible.