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...

There is a large amount of empirical literature reporting that people who regularly attend religious services tend to have better health outcomes. However, it remains an unanswered question as to whether the observed correlation reflects any causality. Exploiting exogenous changes in church...

This chapter aims to study the treatment or processing – including collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, and other uses – of personal data linked to health, under the European Union law framework (with reference to the European Charter of the European Union and EU...

This document is the introductory chapter to my privacy book published by Thomson-West. It offers a conceptual overview of issues and principles that have been adopted by the United States, as well as foreign countries

In examining how badly the United States bungled its COVID-19 pandemic response, it is worth going back to the commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic. Author after author cautioned that the next pandemic would overwhelm the United States health system and that the...

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is currently implemented by more than seventy countries, yet we do not have a clear knowledge of how it affects individuals’ welfare. Using a regression discontinuity design combined with a differences-in-differences approach, we find that the Spring DST causes a...

The North Carolina legislature passed a law that prohibits transgender individuals from using certain public toilets. The legislation has been controversial. Some entertainers have stated they will not hold concerts in North Carolina until the law is repealed. Some corporations have been...

COVID-19 has led to large numbers of deaths, harms, and financial costs. Without an effective vaccine, those will continue. The pressure to find a vaccine is high; and that pressure creates a risk that the safeguards in place to assure that vaccines are safe and effective will be ignored. The...

The main objective of this paper is to shed some clarity on the applicable criteria for the antitrust analysis of side-deals as part of pharmaceutical patent settlements in the European Union. First, this paper critically discusses and compares the criteria used by the EU Commission and the...

Previous research speculates that some regulations are counterproductive in the sense that they increase (rather than decrease) mortality risk. However, few empirical studies have measured the extent to which this phenomenon holds across the regulatory system as a whole. Using a novel US state...