Krislert Samphantharak: This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the impacts on Russia if the country were multilaterally sanctioned and forced into autarky. The authors present an overlapping generation model and calibrate it to compute the impacts under various scenarios of the sanction. What is insightful about this paper is that it sheds light on the heterogeneous impacts on different generations of the Russian population. For example, in the most benign sanction environment, the model predicts that generations born today would be about 4 percent better off and the elderly would experience welfare loss by about 20 percent.
There are some comments on the paper that I would like to raise, however. The first set of comments are from the very long-run analysis of this paper (since the paper simulates the model to 2100 using parameters calibrated for 2013). Under this timeframe, several assumptions must be made—some are intuitive and...