Several commentators during the general discussion raised concerns about the appropriateness of the model used in the analysis. Barry Eichengreen noted that the long-run overlapping generations model used had been developed to investigate pension reform but not the impact of economic sanctions. In particular, he was not aware of any country ever having been subject to economic sanctions for 100 years as investigated by the authors. He stressed that it was important to use a model that is appropriate for the analysis at hand and the urge to modify an existing model to fit particular analysis should be resisted. Yan Shen agreed that a 100-year horizon was inappropriate as people and businesses would work hard to overcome such harmful sanctions.
Kiyohiko Nishimura suggested considering the period of the Cold War, during which sanctions were in place, to inform the empirical analysis. Moreover, he noted that the model only considered the...