The poorest nations of the world suffer from extreme disease burdens, which go largely untreated because weak incomes and the prevailing system of intellectual property rights fail to provide sufficient incentives to develop new treatments and distribute them at low cost. Recent price reductions...

We study the effects of parallel trade in the pharmaceutical industry. We develop a model in which an original manufacturer competes in its home market with parallel-importing firms. The theoretical analysis results in two key hypotheses. First, if the potential for parallel imports is...

This paper provides a direct test of how fixed export costs and productivity jointly determine firm-level export behavior. Using Chilean data, we construct indices of fixed export costs for each industry-region-year triplet and match them to domestic firms. Our empirical results show that firms...

We develop a model of vertical pricing in which an original manufacturer sets wholesale prices in two markets integrated at the distributor level by parallel imports (PI). In this context we show that if competition policy requires uniform wholesale prices across locations it would push retail...

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer...

We examine the impacts of both domestic and international financial market development on R&D intensities in 22 manufacturing industries in 18 OECD countries for the period 1990- 2003. We take account of such industry characteristics as the need for external financing and the amount of tangible...

We study the international protection of consumer data in a model where data usage benefits firms at the expense of their customers. We show that a multinational firm does not balance this trade-off efficiently if its data usage lacks (full) transparency or if consumers’ privacy preference...

The existence of parallel imports (PI) raises a number of interesting policy and strategic questions, which are the subject of this survey article. For example, parallel trade is essentially arbitrage within policy-integrated markets of IPR-protected goods, which may have different prices across...

We consider policy issues regarding parallel imports (PIs) of brand-name pharmaceuticals in the European Union, where such trade is permitted. We develop a simple model in which an original manufacturer competes in its home market with PI firms. The model suggests that for small trade costs the...