How Do Wars Make States? Institutional Trust and Attitudes Toward Tax Compliance in Wartime Ukraine

This paper draws on a series of cross-sectional surveys carried out in Ukraine in 2020, 2022 and 2023 to probe the impact of the Russian invasion of February 2022 on institutional trust - citizen trust in the state - and attitudes toward taxation. Using a difference-in-differences approach for identification, we find that the experience of war spurred institutional trust, but that attitudes and behavioral dispositions related to the tax regime shifted less noticeably. We also find lower levels of both institutional trust and willingness to pay taxes among populations most acutely affected by conflict.