How harmful can government regulations and protectionism be? We provide evidence of a sizable negative impact of government interventions on population health. In 2012, the Russian government implemented a strategy to increase the affordability of pharmaceutical drugs and develop domestic...

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 -...

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases...

The Czech health care system is doing well in terms of health outcomes compared to other Central East European economies that inherited similar health systems after the transition and has been converging to OECD averages. However, benchmarking the Czech health system to countries with comparable...

Trade in health products has been flourishing in recent years as the demand for better health has been growing throughout the world. At the same time, trade in health products is hampered by substantive trade barriers. In this paper, we present evidence that countries around the world still...

Today, the global pharmaceutical product value chain is becoming increasingly complex and this has led to the emergence of 'multiple quality standards' for medicines. But this non-uniformity in the quality of medicine is also contingent upon both the regulatory milieu in the country of...

We evaluate the impact of oral polio vaccines on the incidence of disabilities in India, focusing on polio-related disability. Polio was hyperendemic in India even as recently as the early 1990s but the country was declared wild polio virus-free in 2014. Average treatment effects on the treated...

Fair competition law and public health law talk past each other when discussing pharmaceutical pricing and distribution. The former cannot agree on the relevant definition of consumer welfare. The latter does not fully comprehend the highly complex but inherently collective nature of...

The EU approved the first biosimilar drug in 2006. By 2017, the EU had authorized the highest number of biosimilars worldwide, acquiring considerable experience in their use and safety. In May 2019, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) search engine showed 54 authorized biosimilars. Biosimilars...

We propose that crisis experience influences preferences towards COVID-19 vaccination and the speed of vaccination during the initial phase when vaccines became available. We use macro and micro data to empirically investigate our theory and introduce a novel crisis experience index. Evidence...