Rural development cooperative thrift-fund withdrawal rules and women's petty-trade reinvestment in Ghana: a regression-discontinuity analysis of savings-balance eligibility thresholds

Cooperative thrift-funds in rural Ghana commonly tie access to lump-sum withdrawals to a savings-balance eligibility threshold, yet the causal effect of crossing that threshold on women's petty-trade reinvestment has not been identified. The design is framed as a proposed field evaluation rather than a completed empirical study: no primary data were collected for the present analysis. The paper specifies the estimand, the local-randomisation logic, the bandwidth and polynomial choices, the compliance structure created by loan-officer discretion, and the threats to identification that arise from balance manipulation and endogenous savings behaviour. It also situates the design within the sociology of rural credit, where thrift-funds are understood as hybrid institutions combining rotating savings logic with formal eligibility rules. The contribution is a transferable evaluation template for threshold-governed withdrawal rules in West African cooperative finance, together with a set of testable propositions about how eligibility discontinuities shape women traders' working-capital decisions. The credibility of any such evaluation depends less on the estimator than on the institutional detail of how balances are recorded and how withdrawal requests are screened.