Healthcare payers try to reduce costs by promoting the use of cheaper generic drugs. We show that there are strong interrelations in drug prescriptions between the inpatient and the outpatient sector using a large administrative dataset from Austria. Patients with prior hospital visits have a...

We study cartels that operated in the US generic drug industry, leveraging quarterly Medicaid data from 2011-2018 and a difference-in-differences approach comparing the evolution of prices of allegedly collusive drugs with a group of competitive control drugs. Our analysis highlights (i) the...

Healthcare payers try to reduce costs by promoting the use of cheaper generic drugs. We show strong interrelations in drug prescriptions between the inpatient and outpatient sectors by using a large administrative dataset from Austria. Patients with prior hospital visits have a significantly...

Background: Pharmaceutical expenditure grow strongly in most health care systems. Especially high prices of new drugs are perceived to be driver of growth which might threaten the sustainability of financing drugs. Objective: The study aims to analyse a) whether German health policies can...

The debate on whether COVID-19 vaccine patents are slowing down the pace of vaccination and the recovery from the crisis has brought the optimal design of pharmaceutical patent policy to the fore. In this paper we evaluate patent policy in the US pharmaceutical industry. We estimate the effect...

Policy makers use reference pricing to curb pharmaceutical expenditures by reducing coverage of expensive branded drugs. In a theoretical analysis we show that the net effect of reference pricing is generally ambiguous when accounting for entry by generic producers. Reference pricing shifts...