The United States has recently — and belatedly — come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with U.S. intellectual property law and related elements of U.S. innovation policy. Innovation...

A number of antitrust cases have challenged firm conduct associated with the introduction of a new product. Several are in the pharmaceutical industry and have earned the moniker of “product hopping.” Other cases involve the design of interfaces that defeat interoperability and the supply of...

The modern law of induced patent infringement contradicts the Patent Act and violates the First Amendment. As currently applied, the law unconstitutionally restricts speech, discourages the entry of generic drugs, and helps keep medicine prices high. Under current doctrine, a generic drugmaker...

Using two independent exogenous shocks, we investigate whether the opioid epidemic affects labor and innovation even when personal addiction is not the main driver. Exploiting a setting of corporate innovation where production is mostly generated by white-collar individuals - unlikely addicts -...

This paper examines the impact of the local opioid epidemic on corporate innovation. Using a large sample of U.S. public firms from 2003 to 2017, we find that firms located in counties with higher death rates caused by opioid overdoses are significantly less innovative as measured by their...