Do sanctions actually shut people out of the international financial system? A study in Nature Human Behaviour answers with something close to a mystery-shopper test, and the answer depends on timing.
Findley and colleagues ran two rounds of an audit-style field experiment, sending 7,081 email requests to intermediary firms in 202 countries and jurisdictions asking them to set up shell companies and corporate bank accounts. Some requests used the names of sanctioned Russian officials, with the middle initial altered; others used comparable names of people who were not sanctioned.
In the first round, in December 2020, sanctioned names fared no worse than the placebo names. In the second round, in May 2022 after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, non-compliant responses to sanctioned names fell by about 4 percentage points.
The authors conclude that conditions created by the war, more than the sanctions law itself, narrowed these officials' access to finance. The work also shows what field experiments add to policy evaluation: they measure what intermediaries actually do, not what they report doing.
