In this survey chapter on pricing and reimbursement in U.S. pharmaceutical markets, we first provide background information on important federal legislation, institutional details regarding distribution channel logistics, definitions of alternative price measures, related historical...

This paper analyses how governments can introduce more competition in the pharmaceutical sector. Considering it involves harmonizing issues such as incentives to innovate and perform research and development (R&D), Intellectual Property (IP) rights, healthcare policy and public budget concerns,...

We consider how patent rights and price regulation affect whether new drugs are marketed in a country, and how quickly. The analysis covers a large sample of 68 countries at all income levels and includes all drug launches over the period 1982-2002. It uses newly compiled information on legal...

The United States represents the world’s largest market for pharmaceutical drugs. It is also the only advanced economy in the world that does not regulate drug prices. There is no upper threshold for the prices of medicines in the United States. List prices are instead set by manufacturers in...

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...

This study seeks to provide evidence for deciding whether or not a pharmaceutical innovation should be included in the benefit list of social health insurance. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted in Germany to measure preferences for modern insulin therapy. Of the 1,100 individuals...

We analyze the impact of national pharmaceutical regulation on the launch delay of new chemical entities approved by the EMEA's centralized procedure. We find that direct price control regimes have a significantly negative impact on the launch timing. These results cannot be found when...

Many countries with national health care providers and health insurances regulate the market for pharmaceuticals to steer drug demand and to control expenses. For example, they introduce reference pricing or tiered co-payments to enhance drug substitution and competition. Since 2006, Germany...

This paper studies the effect of two regulatory instruments - a price cap and a reference price system - a mandatory substitution rule, and the combination of both on generic competition in a Salop-type model with an off-patent brand-name drug and n differentiated generic versions. The price cap...

In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the effects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because...