Aleksandra Kirilakha, ’22

What are the effects of economic sanctions on international bilateral trade flows and welfare?

One of the main goals of my research is to develop a comprehensive high dimensional database on sanctions that can allow for a broad range of empirical analyses; besides trade-related applications, as an example, the effects of different types of financial sanctions on FDIs can be studied. Another main focus of my research is showing whether trade sanctions are effective by studying their impact on international trade flows. I show that the effects of trade sanctions are highly heterogeneous by obtaining the distribution of sanction-pair-directional estimates of trade sanctions.

The effectiveness of sanctions as an international policy needs to be studied because it’s important to understand whether sanctions, once implemented, bring the desired results/achieve their political objectives given that sanctions come with high economic and political costs. It’s also important to study which types of sanctions should be preferred given their variety and continuous development. Thus, my research would matter for policy makers as well as scholars.