About me
I am a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Toronto, specializing in International Relations and Public Policy. My research primarily focuses on the political dynamics of trade agreements and sanctions. Due to this interest, I am a Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. My research covers a significant Open Source component, which led me to contribute as a Junior Editor for the Journal of Open Source Software.
My academic background includes a Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of Toronto, a Master of Science in Statistics from the Catholic University of Chile, and an Engineering degree from the University of Chile. Should you need it, I can provide my academic and professional CV upon request. For any queries or further information, please contact me at m.sepulveda@mail.utoronto.ca.
I am convinced that a comprehensive understanding of economic and financial sanctions between countries can be achieved by integrating ideas, interests, institutions, and structures. I aim at studying this combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Econometrics to analyze and quantify the economic repercussions of sanctions. This is detailed in the Research section and in my research statement below.
My research interest has led me to develop advanced R, Python, and C++ skills. My GitHub profile showcases my open-source projects, predominantly focused on gravity estimation, data wrangling in R, and data visualization using Shiny. I have created Open Source implementations for efficient gravity estimation, including published articles about it. More details can be found in the Open Source and Research sections.
I am deeply interested in replication work, which has motivated me to replicate the results from books and articles in international trade and political economy. For more details, see the Replication section where I added step-by-step independent R codes and math for Advanced International Trade, The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity, The Log of Gravity, and An Advanced Guide to Trade Policy Analysis: The Structural Gravity Model.
Additionally, I maintain a blog (pacha.dev/blog), where I post various notes and tutorials. Some highlights include “Creating LaTeX Figures with Inkscape”, “A Crash Course on PostgreSQL for R Users”, and “A Step-by-Step Guide to Write an R Package that Uses C++ Code (Ubuntu)”. These posts reflect my ongoing commitment to both learning and sharing knowledge in the field.
Research Statement
Since the end of World War II, sanctions have increased in number, but their effectiveness has decreased (The Economist 2021), which raises the question whether policy makers implement sanctions to satisfy domestic coalitions or achieve other goals. The economic consequences of sanctions can be explored at the sectoral level, distinguishing categories such as agriculture, energy, manufacturing, mining, and services. The current political and economic order justifies the need to account for the interdependence between different sectors of a national economy in global trade (Sbragia 2011).
I propose the thesis project “Trade Sanctions and Rule-Making,” where I shall answer the question “Who wins and who loses with sanctions?” I will focus on trade sanctions between political allies and the variation of effects between industries. This will uncover general patterns about how these mechanisms work, and to explain why and when policymakers deviate from World Trade Organization practices that reduce global trade uncertainty. The project is relevant due to the spiking complexity of global sanctions (Morgan, Syropoulos, and Yotov 2022; Coates 2019; Ossa 2014) and the rise of protectionism (Walter 2021; Felbermayr et al. 2020).
I intend to explore how Generalized Linear Models, in particular the Structural Gravity Model (Wölwer et al. 2018), can be used to computationally simulate the impact of political decisions, such as a sanction being implemented. This model shows how the resulting changes in one sector in one country causes a chain reaction with consequences in GDP and other measures of economic welfare for third party countries (Vargas Sepulveda 2024; Yotov et al. 2017). At the present time I have published articles and their corresponding software that provide the open source infrastructure to conduct this work (Vargas Sepulveda 2025; Vargas Sepulveda and Schneider Malamud 2025; Vargas Sepulveda 2025; 2024a).
I aim to corroborate and expand existing sanctions databases (Felbermayr et al. 2020) and commodities trade data (Borchert et al. 2021). I intend to produce accurate sectoral trade databases for most of or all UN countries. One core feature of my work will be correcting mismatches in the data between importers and exporters, and cover as many gaps as possible by using administrative data from the UN and state-of-the-art linear models for imputation.
A comprehensive depiction at the sectoral level will enable me to study specific sanctions’ impact and explore how policy toolkits affect different actors, ideas, and institutions (Lasswell 1970), and to balance theory and information-gathering (Simeon 1976). My contribution will be to integrate our political and economic understanding of sanctions, by creating a methodology to estimate the impact of sanctions that policy makers could use to evaluate the effectiveness, success, and impact of their agendas.
References
Borchert, Ingo, Mario Larch, Serge Shikher, and Yoto V. Yotov. 2021. “The International Trade and Production Database for Estimation (ITPD-E).” International Economics 166 (August):140-66.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inteco.2020.08.001.
Coates, Benjamin. 2019. “A Century of Sanctions.” Origins. December 13, 2019. https://origins.osu.edu/article/economic-sanctions-history-trump-global.
Felbermayr, Gabriel, Aleksandra Kirilakha, Constantinos Syropoulos, Erdal Yalcin, and Yoto V. Yotov. 2020. “The Global Sanctions Data Base.” European Economic Review 129 (October):103561. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103561.
Lasswell, Harold D. 1970. “The Emerging Conception of the Policy Sciences.” Policy Sciences 1 (1): 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00145189.
Morgan, T. Clifton, Constantinos Syropoulos, and Yoto Yotov. 2022. “Economic Sanctions: Evolution, Consequences, and Challenges.” School of Economics Working Paper Series, School of Economics Working Paper Series, , November. https://ideas.repec.org//p/ris/drxlwp/2022_012.html.
Ossa, Ralph. 2014. “Trade Wars and Trade Talks with Data.” American Economic Review 104 (12): 4104-46. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.12.4104.
Sbragia, Alberta. 2011. “The EU, the US, and Trade Policy: Competitive Interdependence in the Management of Globalization.” In Europe and the Management of Globalization. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501761003662016.
Simeon, Richard. 1976. “Studying Public Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 9 (4): 548-80. https://doi.org