Assessing the impact of US targeted (personal) sanctions on Russian companies in 2014—2023

The study of the consequences of the application of individual sanctions instruments at the level of industries or segments of the economy allows us to assess the components and factors of overall sustainability, the effectiveness of the state policy. The paper provides an econometric assessment of the impact of US SDN list sanctions on Russian entities in 2014—2023. Sanctions are considered as a lasting impact on the economic performance. The resulting effect of sanctions on revenue and profit indicators is estimated by comparing the dynamics of sanctioned companies and entities from the same industries outside the SDN regime. The modeling was carried out in constant prices, for a balanced panel, with robust standard errors. The final impact of SDN list sanctions on Russian organizations is generally insignificant. The introduction of sanctions was carried out rather for political and declarative reasons than to maximize the damage to be inflicted; the impact was either not felt at all or mitigated by counter-sanction measures. For the IT sector, it was accompanied not by a deterioration, but by an improvement in performance. Thus, political interference in economic activity in the form of targeted (personal) sanctions, even from a strong global player such as the United States, can be mitigated though we don’t know whether such mitigation is the result of market or management decisions, or a retaliatory state counter-sanction policy.