On January 1, 2006, the federal government began providing insurance coverage for Medicare recipients' prescription drug expenditures through a new program known as Medicare Part D. Rather than setting pharmaceutical prices itself, the government contracted with private insurance plans to...

Public financing of private health insurance may generate external effects beyond the subsidized population, by influencing the size and bargaining power of health insurers. We test for this external effect in the context of Medicare Part D. We analyze how Part D-related insurer size increases...

I use the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance market to examine the dynamics of firm interaction with consumers on an insurance exchange. Enrollment data show that consumers face switching frictions leading to inertia in plan choice, and a regression discontinuity design indicates...

In this paper we document a process of price convergence in the European market for pharmaceutical products and relate it to access to innovative medicines in individual countries. The EU is a peculiar case study, where free circulation of goods coexists with pricing policies designed and...

Health insurances curb price insensitive behavior and moral hazard of insureds through different types of cost-sharing, such as tiered co-payments or reference pricing. This paper evaluates the effect of newly introduced price limits below which drugs are exempt from co-payments on the pricing...

Do healthcare providers pick their patients? This paper uses patient-level administrative data on skilled nursing facilities in California to estimate a structural model of selective admission practices in the nursing home industry. I exploit within-facility covariation between occupancy and...

We consider a therapeutic market with potentially three pharmaceutical firms. Two of the firms offer horizontally differentiated brand-name drugs. One of the brand-name drugs is a new treatment under patent protection that will be introduced if the profits are sufficient to cover the entry...

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms' pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called index pricing for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the existing price...

We analyze the impact of national pharmaceutical regulation on the launch delay of new chemical entities approved by the EMEA's centralized procedure. We find that direct price control regimes have a significantly negative impact on the launch timing. These results cannot be found when...

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...