Forty percent of spiraling US drug costs are based on a mere two percent of all drugs –biologic drugs (biologics) made from living cells that are administered by injection or infusion. These costs will continue to balloon as new biologics are approved; the recently approved Alzheimer’s drug is...

Due to differences in the effectiveness and side effects of different drugs, uncertainty is an important component of prescription drug choice. This uncertainty can cause patients and doctors to experiment with different drugs until they find a good match. In this paper, we specify and estimate...

A country's pharmaceutical policy is unique, just like its culture. Japan is no exception. Japan has employed a unique dynamic price-control rule that updates regulated retail prices based on the previous period's transaction prices. At the same time, separation of prescribing and dispensing has...

Pharmaceutical prices are widely dispersed across countries with comparable quality standards. We study two elements of this dispersion; non-tariff barriers and buyer bargaining power. Under monopoly, generic drug prices are 3-4 times higher in the United States. With 6 or more competitors,...

Titanic-scale multistate generic pricing antitrust litigation has been underway since December 2016, involving increasingly a myriad of generic drug manufacturers and drugs. Forty-seven states allege a pricing conspiracy wherein twenty defendants participated in a multitude of specific...

Umbrella branding is a marketing practice whereby multi-product firms leverage their reputation across different product categories. This paper investigates how advertising in the market of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs affects the decision to buy prescription drugs from a promoted brand name. I...

The American Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have developed new standards to curb the influence sales representatives may have on physicians' drug choices. Yet the literature fails to clarify the extent to which shares of prescriptions for branded...

This paper uses macro-level data between 1997 and 2008 to evaluate the effects of China's pharmaceutical price regulations. We find that these regulations had short-run effects on medicine price indices, reducing them by less than 0.5 percentage points. The effects could have been slightly...

Generic competition in the pharmaceutical market is an effective cost-containment mechanism that improves static efficiency and stimulates pharmaceutical innovation. There is no prior study that has empirically analysed the relative delays in adoption of generic competition. This paper aims to...