In the context of the ongoing debate about an innovation crisis in the pharmaceutical industry, we study the success rates of pharmaceutical R&D projects as a measure of innovative productivity. The empirical literature suggests success rates have been decreasing during recent decades. We...

Within the last decades, there have been many technological and regulatory changes in the pharmaceutical industry. Some of these developments facilitate the innovative activities of large firms, while others foster small firms. It is therefore surprising that the implications of these changes in...

Pharmaceutical firms typically enjoy market exclusivity for new drugs from concurrent protection of the underlying invention (through patents) and the clinical trials data submitted for market approval (through data exclusivity). Patent invalidation during drug development renders data...

How does a firm’s market power in existing products affect its incentives to innovate? We explore this fundamental question using granular project-level and firm-level data from the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on a particular mechanism through which incumbent firms maintain their market...

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a U.S. government-led program to accelerate the development, production, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. The program cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a...

In the literature, it is widely discussed whether the pharmaceutical industry is going through an innovation crisis. Unfortunately, no comprehensive review exists to date that outlines the main empirical findings. In this paper, we provide an extensive survey on what is currently known about the...

This paper investigates the determinants of success in the development of new drugs. In specific, it explores the factors of success in drug development programs at different stages of innovation process. We use economies of scale, scope, R&D competition and technological spillovers as...