One of the most heated discussions in economics in recent years has concerned the relationship between market structure and innovation. After a half-century of debate and innumerable studies, the consensus is that there is no clear answer to the question. On a concrete level, the uncertainty...

The recent emergence and rapid growth of biotechnology as a commercial industry has raised serious questions concerning the role of patent law as the industry's dominant form of intellectual property protection. Several commentators, drawing on an analogy to computer software protection, have...

In 1996, the chemical firm Monsanto bought a plant breeder that had developed a new corn hybrid, which could withstand Monsanto’s powerful herbicide Roundup. Due to the pre-existing structure of the US plant-breeding industry, this acquisition and Monsanto’s acquisition of five other corn...

These are neither the best of times nor the worst of times for the pharmaceutical industry, or for global public health. Media reports regarding recent legal developments would suggest that the originator pharmaceutical industry is facing a new and dangerous threat to its long-term welfare,...

This comment highlights the importance of context, the appropriate test, and balance for the IP/competition intersection. First, it emphasizes the importance of context, in particular the regulatory regime in the pharmaceutical industry, highlighting the role the FTC can play through litigation,...

New drug introductions are a key to growth for pharmaceutical firms. However not all innovations are the same and they may have differential effects that vary by firm size. We use quarterly sales data on UK pharmaceuticals in a dynamic panel model to estimate the impact of product (new drugs)...

Leveraging the detailed project-level data on biotech startups and their IPO records, this paper studies how adverse selection in capital markets affects financing decisions of entrepreneurs and firm values. By structurally estimating a dynamic model that features strategic experimentation and...

Vaccines play a crucial role in improving global public health, with the ability to stem the spread of infectious diseases and the potential to eradicate them completely. Compared with pharmaceuticals that treat disease, however, preventative vaccines for infectious diseases have received far...

This paper studies how competition impacts innovative firms’ voluntary disclosure of product quality information. Our empirical context is the pharmaceutical industry, where firms must decide whether to disclose drug quality information acquired in clinical trials. Leveraging variation in...