Russian counter-sanctions and smuggling: Forensics with structural gravity estimation
Journal: Journal of International Economics
Year: 2024

Trade and other economic sanctions are a common foreign policy instrument, but their imposition may induce smuggling. We develop and implement procedures to study smuggling after the food embargo imposed by Russia on Western countries after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. We construct predicted trade flows for the post-sanctions period using an estimated structural general equilibrium gravity model with many industry sectors and compare those predictions with actual trade flows. We identify a