Rising costs in pharmaceutical expenditure have become a major concern for policy makers in Germany over the last years. Therefore the pharmaceutical market in Germany has been increasingly targeted by different kinds of regulations, focussing both on the supply and the demand side, using price,...

Reference price systems for prescription drugs constitute widely adopted cost containment tools. In these systems, patients co-pay a fraction of the difference between a drug's pharmacy retail price and a reference price that is set by the government. Reference prices are either determined...

Reference prices constitute a main determinant of patient health care reimbursement in many countries. We study the effects of a change from an "external" (based on a basket of prices in other countries) to an "internal" (based on comparable domestic products) reference price system. We find...

International reference pricing (IRP) has become a popular policy instrument in Europe as government seeks to curb healthcare costs and notably reduce expenditure on medicines. IRP builds on systematic price comparisons with other countries and aims at fixing low reimbursement levels for drugs...