<p>Employing the event study approach based on a novel dataset, this paper provides evidence on the effects of sanctions on economic growth for a large sample of countries during 1960–2022. Our baseline investigation provides some evidence on the adverse impact of sanctions on target’s growth; though we find that the effects of sanctions are short-lived, that is target’s economies tend to recover as soon as the sanctions are lifted. Also, longer sanctions are not more effective than short-term ones, i.e., sanctions become even less effective over time. Further, we provide evidence that the economic effects of sanctions are heterogenous not only with respect to senders (unilateral versus multilateral) and types of sanctions (financial, trade, travel, and other), but also with respect to the targets themselves (advanced versus developing countries). Finally, we tackle the endogeneity of sanctions by implementing four staggered difference-in-differences estimators, which cannot provide support to the presumed effectiveness of economic sanctions.</p>