The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) intends to take American health care in a new direction by focusing on preventive medicine and wellness-based treatment. But, in doing so, it does not adequately take into account the potential contribution of complementary and alternative...

In 2006, a working group of the World Health Organization recommended the establishment of a mandatory clinical trials registry for all research involving humans. Clinical trials registration prior to subject recruitment is required by many major medical journals, and several national regulators...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to make difficult ethical choices, e.g., how to balance public health and socioeconomic activity and whom to prioritize in allocating vaccines or other scarce medical resources. We discuss the implications of benefit-cost analysis, utilitarianism, and...

This paper looks at the origins and limits of EU health law and policy. The main questions asked are whether EU health law is expanding and how; whether it operates within fixed limits; and whether healthcare is a special case in EU integration. Special attention is paid to the emergence of a...

Maternal and newborn health in rural America suffers from a lack of obstetrical care, which is currently at crisis levels. Many state-level public policies have exacerbated or even initiated barriers to quality and access in rural healthcare. Such policies include certificate-of-need (CON) laws,...

This report provides an analysis of patents covering medicines in trials to treat COVID-19. The aim of the report is to support national patent offices and interested parties in developing countries with information that can serve as guidance for the examination of the claims contained in...

We assess the causal impact of epidemic-induced lockdowns on health and macroeconomic outcomes and measure the trade-off between containing the spread of an epidemic and economic activity. To do so, we estimate an epidemiological model with time-varying parameters and use its output as...

How does contagion risk affect the business cycle? We find that the presence of contagion risk significantly alters the transmission of standard macroeconomic shocks. Relative to the first-best equilibrium, the contagion externality significantly reduces the response of output to a technology...

Countries have employed a variety of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in order to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the success of individual measures in reducing the number of infections remains controversial. This paper exploits a panel data set of 107 countries to estimate the...

The purpose of this report is to analyze the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the vaccine industry from an international perspective. The objective is to learn from the experience and contribute to the design of better tools for future vaccine development and manufacturing, as we...