It is theoretically shown that mergers between incumbents and nascent competitors (future rivals or fringe firms) can boost prices and reduce consumer welfare. But no merger has been litigated on this basis due to a lack of empirical evidence. To offer empirical insights, I study the acquisition...

Health insurance markets in the United States are characterized by imperfect information, complex products, and substantial search frictions. Insurance agents and brokers play a significant role in helping employers navigate these problems. However, little is known about the relation between the...

This guide gives tips on how to do (quantitative) research and on how to write it up. These insights seem to hold throughout all (social) sciences. I illustrate them using examples from finance and economics. My main goal is to save budding researchers time by preventing them from doing bad...

This guide gives tips on how to do (quantitative) research and on how to write it up. These insights seem to hold throughout all (social) sciences. I illustrate them using examples from finance and economics. My main goal is to save budding researchers time by preventing them from doing bad...

Previous empirical studies that have examined the links between pharmaceutical price controls, profits, cash flows, and investment in research and development (R&D) have been largely based on retrospective statistical analyses of firm- and/or industry-level data. These studies, which have...

We examine HMO participation and enrollment in the Medicare risk market for the years 1990 to 1995. We develop a profit- maximization model of HMO behavior, which explicitly considers potential linkages between an HMO's production decision in the commercial enrollee market and its participation...

Governments often subsidize poorer groups in society to ensure their access to new drugs. We analyze here the optimal income-based price subsidies in a strategic environment. We show that asymmetric health systems can arise even though countries are ex-ante symmetric when international price...

We consider a policy game between a high-income country hosting a drug innovator and a low-income country hosting a drug imitator. The low-income country chooses whether to enforce an International Patent Regime (strict IPR) or not (weak IPR) and the high-income country chooses whether to allow...

The goal of this paper is to identify key issues concerning the nature of competition in health care markets and its impacts on quality and social welfare and to identify pertinent findings from the theoretical and empirical literature on this topic. The theoretical literature in economics on...

The viatical settlement industry provides an opportunity for terminally-ill consumers, typically HIV patients, to exploit a previously untapped source of equity in existing life insurance contracts to finance consumption and medical expenses. The 1996 introduction and dissemination of effecive...