The extent of pharmaceutical advertising and promotion can be characterized by a balancing act between profitable demand expansions and potentially unfavorable subsequent regulatory actions. However, this balance also depends on the nature of competition (e.g. monopoly versus oligopoly). In this...

What does economics have to say about the design of international trade agreements? We review a literature on this question, providing detailed coverage on three key design features of the GATT/WTO: reciprocity, nondiscrimination as embodied in the MFN principle, and tariff bindings and binding...

Focusing on 8 drug types on the WHO-approved medicine list, we constructed an original dataset of 899 drug samples from 17 low- and median-income countries and tested them for visual appearance, disintegration, and analyzed their ingredients by chromatography and spectrometry. Fifteen percent of...

This paper analyzes determinants of ex-manufacturer prices for originator and generic drugs across a large sample of countries. We focus on drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in middle and low income countries (MLICs), with robustness checks to other therapeutic categories and other...

Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk of R&D programs and uniquely unpredictable demand for EID vaccines have discouraged...

Does drug treatment for depression with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase or decrease the risk of completed suicide? The question is important in part because of recent government warnings that question the safety of SSRIs, one of the most widely prescribed medications in...

This study examines the effect of price regulation and competition on launch timing and pricing of new drugs. Our data cover launch experience in 15 countries for drugs in 12 therapeutic classes that experienced significant innovation over the decade 1992-2003. We use prices of established...

This study examines the effect of chain store entry on drug quality and prices in the retail pharmacy market in Hyderabad, India. In contrast to prevailing mom-and-pop pharmacies, chains exploit scale economies to offer high-quality drugs at lower cost. With a unique data set and a natural...

The home-market effect, first hypothesized by Linder (1961) and later formalized by Krugman (1980), is the idea that countries with larger demand for some products at home tend to have larger sales of the same products abroad. In this paper, we develop a simple test of the home-market effect...