Rural development cooperative tractor-hire queue-priority ballots and women's plot-preparation timeliness in Ethiopia: a regression-discontinuity analysis of queuing-position thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Ethiopia allocate scarce tractor-hire slots through queue-priority ballots whose ranking rules create sharp cut-offs in the order in which women smallholders receive mechanised plot preparation. The design treats the ballot rank as the running variable, the threshold separating priority from non-priority positions as the discontinuity, and the days from ballot to plot preparation as the outcome, with plot-level covariates and cooperative fixed effects. Using the DHS Program indicator 'Households using water piped into yard/plot' (WS_SRCE_H_PYD) for 35 African countries between 1991 and 2025 (N = 166 country-survey observations, mean 11.502, standard deviation 10.04, range from 0.64 in Egypt to 40.00 in the Gambia), the paper illustrates the descriptive context in which rural water and mechanisation infrastructure jointly condition women's plot-preparation timeliness. The contribution is a pre-registration-ready identification strategy and a set of falsification tests that connect queuing-position thresholds to gendered timeliness outcomes, rather than a completed empirical estimate.