Two faces of Fiscal Knowledge: Rational and Blind Trust in the Tax System

The data come from an online questionnaire on perceptions of taxation, completed by 814 economics students taking a public finance course in Romania. Responses were collected in six waves between January 2016 and November 2020. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, without payment. The questionnaire measures: trust in the tax system (yes/no); fiscal knowledge, with six items scored from 0 to 1 (V1–V6): the contribution of the tax system to development, opinions on a VAT cut and its expected effects, why we pay taxes, the role of tax revenue for the state budget, and statements that would motivate trust; the rating of the current tax system on a 1–5 scale (V7); the preferred location of a company's headquarters (country of citizenship, country with higher turnover, or tax haven); gender and collection wave. Online survey (Google Forms, in Romanian) of economics students taking a public finance course in Romania. Students were invited online during the course; participation was voluntary and anonymous and was not paid. Six collection waves: W1 January–May 2016 (N = 183), W2 November 2016–February 2017 (N = 98), W3 December 2017–April 2018 (N = 103), W4 January 2019 (N = 135), W5 January 2020 (N = 159), W6 October–November 2020 (N = 136). Each respondent answered once (pooled cross-section). Free-text "Other" answers and a few blank answers were assigned by the authors to the closest category; the codebook documents the scoring of every item. The study received ethics approval. This work was supported from the National Scientific Program "Petar Beron i NIE” in Bulgaria, BG-175467353-2023-14-0004/ /KP-06-DB/7 from 14.12.2023