Drug recalls, contamination events, and shortages are on the rise, but drug companies still rely on decades-old manufacturing plants and processes. Contrary to widespread perceptions, drug manufacturing is typically expensive, inefficient, and non-innovative. Drug companies spend much more on...

New information technologies enable individuals in disparate locations to conduct cutting-edge research, to move that research into the development and testing of new medicines, to manufacture high-quality products, and to move those products to patients around the world. Conceptually, the world...

External reference pricing (ERP), the practice of benchmarking domestic drug prices to foreign prices, generates an incentive for firms to withhold products from low-income countries. Using a novel moment inequality approach, we estimate a structural model to measure the extent to which ERP...

This chapter describes the market for pharmaceuticals, which exceeded $500 million in sales in 2010. The industry is also characterized by extensive regulation of almost every activity, from product development through manufacturing and marketing, which we summarize. We next describe the...

The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have caused over 7 million deaths and reduced economic output by over $13 trillion to date. While vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, pre-pandemic investments could have accelerated their widespread introduction, saving millions of...

We derive the optimal funding mechanism to incentivize development and production of vaccines against diseases with epidemic potential. In the model, suppliers' costs are private information and investments are noncontractible, precluding cost-reimbursement contracts, requiring fixed-price...

We study the patent strategy of pharmaceutical firms in reaction to the threat of generic entry. Estimating difference-in-differences saturated with a host of fixed effects, we show that while these firms continue to produce patents after a drug is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration...

Die im GKV-Finanzstabilisierungsgesetz verankerten Änderungen der Rahmenbedingungen für die Erstattungsbetragsverhandlungen innovativer Arzneimittel werden als Gefahr für die zukünftige Versorgung der Patienten und für den Forschungs- und Produktionsstandort gesehen. Die neuen Leitplanken...