Health insurance plans in the U.S. increasingly use price mechanisms to steer demand for prescription drugs. The effectiveness of these incentives, however, depends both on physicians' price sensitivity and their knowledge of patient prices. We develop a moment inequality model that allows...

In his Labor Day address, President Biden stated that the U.S. "has the highest drug prices in the world, and there is no reason for it." For new branded drugs, the first part of that statement is supported by a recent RAND Report (Mulcahy et. al. 2021) which found U.S. average prices are 2.3...

Rising list prices are often used to illustrate the burden of prescription drug spending, but payers routinely negotiate rebates from manufacturers that generate differences between list and net prices. List prices are easily available and affect patient cost-sharing, but net prices are...

We empirically analyze the welfare effects of cross-firm bundling in the pharmaceutical industry. Physicians often treat patients with "cocktail" regimens that combine two or more drugs. Firms cannot price discriminate because each drug is produced by a different firm and a physician creates the...

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...

EU countries closely regulate pharmaceutical prices whereas the U.S. does not. This paper shows how price constraints affect the profitability, stock returns, and R&D spending of EU and U.S. firms. Compared to EU firms, U.S. firms are more profitable, earn higher stock returns, and spend more on...

Medicare's Part D offers heavily subsidized new drug coverage to 22.5 million seniors to date, of whom 16.5 million are in stand-alone drug plans (Department of Health and Human Services, 2006). The government delegated the delivery of the benefit to private insurance companies arguing that...