This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 29th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. Sanctions have a poor record at affecting policy change in unfriendly regimes, so how are so-called targeted

sanctions on Russia supposed to work?

Emma Ashford, a visiting research fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses the strange incentives

and signaling at work when the U.S. imposes sanctions.

What sanctions that the U.S currently impose on Russia?

We're imposing a variety of sanctions.

We started last year when Russia invaded Crimea.

We put some relatively minimal sanctions

on mostly individuals, people close to the Kremlin.

When Russia then started being very aggressive in Eastern Ukraine,

we added more sanctions on Russian banks, on Russian energy companies, and on sort of

the business that US companies can do with Russian entities.

So these were not blanket sanctions broadly on the

Russian economy? No, that's the difference between what we call today targeted

sanctions and the more sort of broad embargoes that we used to impose.

So if you think about Iraq in the 1990s under Saddam Hussein, we basically imposed a

complete trade embargo, no products in or out. Today on Russia we're only imposing sanctions on very specific

entities, things we think will hurt people close to Vladimir Putin and businesses that

the Kremlin relies on for its income.

Why then targeted sanctions?

What do we think we know about targeted sanctions that we know doesn't work with broad sanctions.

...