Clément Montes

\({\color{purple}{\texttt{Sectoral vs. Firm-Level Sanctions in Trade Policy}}}\)

This paper presents the Firm Sanctioned Data Base (FSDB), a novel dataset documenting all entities sanctioned by the European Union from 2001 to 2025. The FSDB provides a detailed timeline of sanctions, including the date of threat, date of sanction, and lifting of sanctions when applicable. In addition, it tracks the addresses of targeted entities. Using this granular dataset, I revisit styl- ized facts from the literature by adding the intensity of sanctions. I further describe four threats to identification of the impact of sanctions. Two threats deal with a misclassification of location, accounting for a fourth of the FSDB entities. The two other biases come from the anticipation following the threat and extraterritorial sanctions, accounting for another half of the FSDB. I use this new information to estimate the impact of firm-level sanctions on disaggre- gated bilateral trade flows. I find that secondary sanctions decreased average trade flows of sanctioned products by 38%. Ignoring the staggered enforcement of sanctions considerably biases the estimate, and overlooking the anticipations increases the variance of the estimate of the impact.