The Affordable Care Act included a provision to eliminate the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap. The policy was phased in by gradually diminishing the gap each year between 2011-2020. This provides a natural experiment to conduct an in-depth study of how the policy affected medication use,...

We analyze changes in the willingness to substitute from prescribed pharmaceuticals to more affordable generic equivalents in response to the first experience with a substitution. Using Swedish individual-level data of prescribed and dispensed pharmaceuticals, we employ a dynamic event study and...

Markets require informed participants to function efficiently. This paper examines the impact of providing targeted information directly to patients on their purchasing-decisions regarding pharmaceutical drugs. We analyze the effect of informational letters sent by a Swiss health insurer to...

Patent holders attempt to mitigate the loss of monopoly power by authorizing generic entry prior to patent expiry (early entry). Off-patent competition may be adversely affected if early entry substantially lowers the attractiveness of subsequent generic entry. This study assesses the impact of...

Generic competition in the pharmaceutical market is an effective cost-containment mechanism that improves static efficiency and stimulates pharmaceutical innovation. There is no prior study that has empirically analysed the relative delays in adoption of generic competition. This paper aims to...

We study the impact of regulation on competition between brand-names and generics and pharmaceutical expenditures using a unique policy experiment in Norway, where reference pricing (RP) replaced price cap regulation in 2003 for a sub-sample of off-patent products. First, we construct a vertical...

Patent holders frequently attempt to mitigate the loss of monopoly power by authorizing generic entry prior to patent expiry (early entry). Competition in off-patent pharmaceutical markets may be adversely affected if early entry substantially impairs the attractiveness of subsequent market...

We study the impact of product margins on pharmacies' incentive to promote generics instead of brand-names. First, we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand-name prescription to purchase a generic version instead. We show that pharmacies' substitution...

Patent holders frequently attempt to mitigate the loss of monopoly power by authorizing generic entry prior to patent expiry (early entry). Competition in off-patent pharmaceutical markets may be adversely affected if early entry substantially impairs the attractiveness of subsequent market...

Patent holders attempt to mitigate the loss of monopoly power by authorizing generic entry prior to patent expiry (early entry). Off-patent competition may be adversely affected if early entry substantially lowers the attractiveness of subsequent generic entry. This study assesses the impact of...