Direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals has led to questions of whether consumers benefit from the additional drug information, or are harmed by being induced to pursue prescriptions that are unnecessary or even dangerous. We conducted an empirical study of the relation between...

We examine how direct to consumer advertising (DCA) affects the delay between diagnosis and pharmacological treatment for patients suffering from a common chronic disease. The primary data for this study consist of patients diagnosed with osteoarthritis (N=18,235) taken from a geographically...