Sanctions, Sales, and Stigma: Intermediary Online Firms’ Market Role in Sustaining Trade
Description
This is replication data for the journal article "Sanctions, Sales, and Stigma: Intermediary Online Firms’ Market Role in Sustaining Trade", forthcoming in the Journal of International Economics. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, online intermediaries enabled brands to retain a presence in the Russian market as many global companies—presumably or actually—withdrew due to legal and reputational concerns. Our paper examines how sales by intermediaries responded to international sanctions. Using novel data on customer transactions of 95 global brands from 1,761 web shops, we show that sales to Russia dropped significantly after the invasion, especially among shops from countries enacting export restrictions. This drop was substantial yet not absolute. Guided by a stylized conceptual framework, we explore which intermediary shops helped sustain sales to Russia, linking their actions to economic incentives and the brand-specific legal and reputational concerns. Overall, we demonstrate how market structure shapes shops’ compliance with sanctions and highlight how economic incentives undermine compliance. Our analysis uses proprietary, high-quality first-party data from Grips Intelligence, a German business analytics firm. The data is collected via direct data-sharing agreements with partners and captures websites' performance data (e.g., user sessions, transactions, conversions) using web analytics services. This approach avoids recall biases and provides accurate, unsampled sales data. The data's high accuracy is reflected in its widespread use among industrial customers for predicting company revenues, brand sales, and overall e-commerce performance, including six of the ten largest quantitative hedge funds, all tier-one global management consultancies, and major marketing research companies. The data has a global coverage, excluding China, and represents a significant percentage of total e-commerce revenue in various countries. Our transaction data relies solely on online purchases, collecting all transactions registered by web shops through Google Analytics. Our data is a convenience sample of online intermediaries that use Google Analytics and opt-in into data sharing agreements with Grips Intelligence and its partners. Additionally, we encode the presence of export bans on consumer products based on regulatory information. To identify global brands' exit from the Russian market, we complement our dataset with the Yale CELI List of Companies Leaving and Staying in Russia. We identify brands with special Russian demand based on Regulation No.~1532 by the Russian Federal Ministry of Industry and Trade, dated April 19, 2022. Our data spans individual online transactions from January 2, 2021, to March 29, 2023. The replication data is aggregated by week, online intermediary, brand, and buyer country.
Files
Steps to reproduce
Steps to reproduce all results in the paper are detailed in Readme.txt and the attached program files.