The Covid-19 pandemic tragically emphasized severe failures of health systems. In particular, the saturation of hospital infrastructures and the lack of medical devices is crucial for respiratory ventilators. The medical and pharmaceutical sectors had to find urgently new ways to innovate...

We provide a theoretical framework to contribute to the current debate regarding the tendency of pharmaceutical companies to direct their R&D toward marketing products that are "follow-on" drugs of already existing drugs, rather than toward the development of breakthrough drugs. We construct a...

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...