This paper focuses on the identification and quantitative estimation of sanctions on the Iranian economy over the period 1989-2019. It provides a new time series approach and proposes a novel measure of sanctions intensity based on daily newspaper coverage. In absence of sanctions, Iran's average annual growth could have been around 4-5%, as compared to the 3% realized. Estimates of the proposed sanctions-augmented structural VAR show that sanctions significantly decrease oil export revenues and result in substantial depreciation of Iranian rial, followed by subsequent increases in inflation and falls in output growth. Keeping other shocks fixed, 2 years of sanctions can explain up to 60% of output growth forecast error variance, although a single quarter sanction shock proves to have quantitatively small effects. KEYWORDS direct and indirect effects of sanctions, forecast error variance decompositions, impulse responses, measures of sanction intensity, sanctions-augmented structural VAR This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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A key element to understand complex systems is the relationship between the spatial scale of investigation and the structure of the interrelation among its elements. When it comes to economic systems, it is now well-known that the country-product bipartite network exhibits a nested structure, which is the foundation of different algorithms that have been used to scientifically investigate countries' development and forecast national economic growth. Changing the subject from countries to companies, a significantly different scenario emerges. Through the analysis of a unique dataset of Italian firms' exports and a worldwide dataset comprising countries' exports, here we find that, while a globally nested structure is observed at the country level, a local, in-block nested structure emerges at the level of firms. Remarkably, this in-block nestedness is statistically significant with respect to suitable null models and the algorithmic partitions of products into blocks have a high correspondence with exogenous product classifications. These findings lay a solid foundation for developing a scientific approach based on the physics of complex systems to the analysis of companies, which has been lacking until now.

This paper considers how sanctions affected the Iranian economy using a novel measure of sanctions intensity based on daily newspaper coverage. It finds sanctions to have significant effects on exchange rates, inflation, and output growth, with the Iranian rial over-reacting to sanctions, followed up with a rise in inflation and a fall in output. In absence of sanctions, Iran's average annual growth could have been around 4 − 5 per cent, as compared to the 3 per cent realized. Sanctions are also found to have adverse effects on employment, labor force participation, secondary and high-school education, with such effects amplified for females.