Using data on the occurrence of central bank independence (CBI) reforms in 131 countries during 1980-2005, we test whether they were important in reducing inflation and maintaining price stability. CBI reforms are found to have reduced inflation on average 3.31% when countries with historically...

This paper reports on a study of the prescribing physician's influence on consumers' choice between medically equivalent pharmaceuticals. The study was performed using a dataset of 666,000 observations in which consumers were asked whether they were prepared to pay the price difference in order...

This paper analyses how market shares for brand name drugs are affected by generic competition. The analysis is based on micro data for twelve original drugs, wich are all subject to generic competition. For five of these drugs, we find that the price of the original relative to the average...

In this paper, a Poisson regression model is used to study the determinants of entry of new firms into the Swedish retail- and wholesale trade markets. The results suggest that incumbent firms engage in strategic behavior to prevent the entry of newcomers. Regional factors are also found to be...

This paper analyzes the impact of uncertainty concerning product quality of generic drugs on the substitution behavior of prescribing physicians. It is shown that uncertainty about the generic drug quality gives the physician a value of waiting for more information before switching to the...

In this paper, the impact of increased consumer information on brand name and generic pharmaceutical prices is analyzed both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical results show that an increase in information is likely to reduce the price of brand name pharmaceuticals, while the results...

This paper analyses the factors that determine entry into the Swedish pharmaceuticals market. The analysis is based on panel data for 22 different substances covering the years 1972 to 1996. The results show that profit opportunities in a particular market have a positive impact on entry. In...

In the county of Västerbotten, Sweden, there are two health centres which (contrary to all other health centres in the region) have a strict responsibility over their pharmaceutical budget. The purpose of this paper is to examine if the prices and quantities of pharmaceuticals prescribed by...

The paper empirically studies whether pharmaceutical firms uses advertising as a signal for high quality drugs. A nested random effects count data hurdle model is introduced to handle the excess number of zero observations in the sample as well as nested random drug, firm and substance specific...

The Swedish health care system is to a large extent publicly managed by 21 local county councils. During recent years there has been a movement were local county councils have opted to allow more of the production to be performed by alternative producers (i.e. private firms, cooperatives etc.)....