either survey. From the household survey, trust in the local council did fall, as did the share of respondents reporting that most neighborhoods are accessible by road and that had satisfactory responses from officials regarding complaints. Among government officials, no results suggest worsening response about state capacity, and several indicators related to planning systems, taxation, capacity building and culture of performance registered improvements.

Turning to the right-hand panel, the observation is that for almost all indicators, changes in project areas were not different from those observed in comparison areas (i.e., estimates of the β coefficient are often very small in magnitude and statistically indistinguishable from zero). Among households’ responses about state capacity, for example, no indicators related to urban planning, fiduciary systems, accountability or taxation changed differentially in project areas between the first and second survey rounds. The only indicator that recorded a differential change in the treated areas was the share of neighborhoods accessible by road, which decreased in in comparison areas while increasing in project LGAs.

Among government officials, the same pattern repeats: for the vast majority of indicators we observe no differential trend in project vs. comparison LGAs. For the few indicators that did change differentially, we observe better performance of comparison LGAs: for several indicators related to taxation, like seeing opportunity to increase tax revenue and respondents paying taxes on their own property, performance improved more in comparison than project areas.

We also present results for the aggregate indices created, in Table 9 and Table 10. In both tables, panel A presents results for a simple difference-in-differences specification, without including any comparisons, while Panel B includes individual-level comparisons. For both panels, Table 9 shows that, except for the Accountability and Oversight index, respondents in comparison LGAs were more positive in the second survey than in the first one - as documented by the positive coefficients of the indicator variable for the 2018 survey round. The improvement in project LGAs, however, was no different than that observed in comparison LGAs: the coefficients on the interaction between the project indicator and the second round survey indicator is small and indistinguishable from zero. Across all outcomes, we can reject impacts larger than 0.3-0.4 s.d.<sup>24</sup> This is consistent with the fact that we observed no differential improvement in responses in the vast majority of the underlying variables used to construct these indices.

The same overall result is found for the government officials’ survey on Table 10. Here we present three aggregate indices - the staff capacity index, the management index, and the performance culture index - as well as three of the main indicators of state capacity - having an updated master plan, perceiving the internal audit office as independent, and capacity to raise local revenue. For all outcomes, the point estimates suggests an improvement in the second survey round, though not always statistically significant. The difference-in-differences coefficients, on the other hand, are always smaller in magnitude and never statistically different from zero. For several estimates, point estimates are negative, suggesting that, if anything, comparison LGAs

> 24As a reference, we estimate overall increases of 0.41 and 0.52 s.d. for the indices on Urban Planning system and Views on taxation and fees, respectively, between the first and second round surveys. In both indices the differencein-differences estimates are an order of magnitude smaller, and we can reject effects larger than 0.25 s.d.

24