"Some two decades will shortly have passed since the WTO's Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement came into force in 1995. TRIPS is widely considered to have had a negative impact on access to medicines through its rules on pharmaceutical patents. This volume is the...

This paper analyses the causal impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical innovation in a panel of 74 countries. The identification strategy exploits the different timing across countries of two sets of IPR reforms. Domestic innovation is measured as citation-weighted...

A public economics framework is used to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the research and development incentive comes from sales revenues. Familiar techniques of public finance are used to relax some of the restrictions implied in the standard use of Ramsey...