This paper addresses the relationship between patent protection and investment in the development of new pharmaceutical treatments. The TRIPS Agreement, which specifies minimum levels of intellectual property protection for countries in the World Trade Organization, has increased levels of...

Preventives are sold ex ante, before disease status is realized, while treatments are sold ex post. Even if the mean of the ex ante distribution of consumer values is the same as that ex post, the shape of the distributions may differ, generating a difference between the surplus each product can...

We provide a method allowing to identify margins in an oligopoly price competition game when prices may not be freely chosen in some markets, for example due to regulation. We use our identification strategy to study the effects of regulatory constraints in the pharmaceutical industry, which is...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a surprisingly large expansion in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the...

This paper proposes a theoretical explanation of the empirical finding that private consumption increases in response to an increase in government spending. The explanation requires two ingredients. First, labor demand expands (e.g. prices are sticky). Second, general non-separable preferences...

We document that an increase in government purchases generates a rise in consumption, the real and the product wage, and a fall in the markup. This evidence is robust across alternative empirical methodologies used to identify innovations in government spending (structural VAR vs. narrative...