7/20/2007Threat and Imposition of Sanctions (TIES)
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Principal Investigator: Cliff Morgan
Co-Investigator: Valentin Krustev
Co-Investigator: Navin Bapat
Project Description
The conventional wisdom that economic sanctions are not an effective instrument of foreign policy is based on the empirical analysis of numerous cases in which sanctions were applied. This work may suffer from selection bias in that instances in which sanctions would be effective may be characterized by the absence of their imposition. That is, the target may be able to anticipate that it would alter its policies as a result of sanctions and may choose to acquiesce to potential sanctioner's threats in order to avoid the cost of economic dislocation. Using a game theoretic model, this project demonstrates that in equilibrium, any outcome of a sanctions episode is possible with some non-zero probability; but, sanctions that would be effective typically would bring about change in the target's behavior at the threat stage and would never be applied. The model produces explanations that are consistent with the empirical record and provides explanations for some of the puzzles regarding economic sanctions (such as why they would continue to be imposed despite strong evidence that they are usually ineffective).
The goal of this project is to continue the theoretical development of the model and to develop a dataset with which the hypotheses can be tested. Data on instances in which sanctions were threatened, but not imposed, do not currently exist. Currently, this project has collected data on instances of both the threat and implementation of sanctions during the period from 1971-2000. This dataset is scheduled for release in Spring 2006.
Data Users' Manual: This document describes the variables in the TIES Data Version 3.5. Please use this codebook for citations.
Codebook: This is the original codebook for the collection of sanctions episodes. In Data Version 3.5, the individual sanctions episodes are merged into sanctions cases, making all of the variables case level.
7/20/2007