Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> China imposed export licensing controls on a group of heavy rare earth elements in early spring, disrupting supply chains that manufacturers outside China depend on for permanent magnets, catalysts, and specialty alloys. Whether this shock produced a uniform price effect across importer countries and product categories, or a heterogeneous one, remains unexamined in the existing literature on critical mineral export restrictions. This paper evaluates the causal effect of the controls on import prices and the share of imports sourced from China, using an augmented synthetic control design applied to a monthly panel of product-country pairs spanning several years before and after the shock. The estimated price effect is heterogeneous rather than uniform, differing in direction between rare earth metals and rare earth compounds, and a formal test confirms this dispersion reflects a genuine feature of the shock rather than estimation noise. Pre-treatment exposure to Chinese supply does not systematically predict the size of the price response, pointing toward substitution availability and technological adaptation rather than exposure intensity as the likelier explanation for which country and product pairs are affected. Policymakers and manufacturers should treat critical mineral export controls as a shock whose consequences depend on where a product sits in the value chain, rather than assuming a single, predictable price outcome. <bold>JEL classification:</bold> F13; F14; Q37; C21 </p>