  We revisit the results of a recent paper by Equipo Anova, who claim to find
evidence of an improvement in Venezuelan imports of food and medicines
associated with the adoption of U.S. financial sanctions towards Venezuela in
2017. We show that their results are consequence of data coding errors and
questionable methodological choices, including the use an unreasonable
functional form that implies a counterfactual of negative imports in the
absence of sanctions, the omission of data accounting for four-fifths of the
country's food imports at the time of sanctions and incorrect application of
regression discontinuity methods. Once these errors are corrected, the evidence
of a significant improvement in the level and rate of change in imports of
essentials disappears.
