Robustness Replication of Blair & Roessler (2021): Foreign Aid and State Legitimacy in Africa

This is a robustness replication of Blair, R.A. and Roessler, P. (2021) "Foreign Aid and State Legitimacy: Evidence on Chinese and US Aid to Africa from Surveys, Survey Experiments, and Behavioral Games," World Politics 73(2), 315–357. Using the authors' original replication data (Harvard Dataverse, DOI: 10.7910/DVN/5JH0WJ, V1), we re-run their primary analyses with an alternative model specification that disaggregates results by urban and rural respondents. The original study finds null-to-positive effects of aid exposure on tax compliance and tax morale in Liberia. We test whether this null result holds across both subgroups given the substantially different aid exposure rates Blair and Roessler report for urban vs. rural respondents (86% vs. 48% for Chinese aid). All analyses are pre-specified here prior to opening the dataset.