Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; that is, unless the imitation is of a product produced by a multi billion-dollar industry. Then, imitation has the potential to involve intellectual property litigation. For the pharmaceutical industry, the majority of intellectual property litigation...

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 identify the rate of off-label use of prescription drugs in the United States during 1993-2008 using Detection Controlled Estimation. We find the rate rises from 29.9% to 38.3% during this period. Off-label prescribing increases when there are fewer FDA-approved alternatives and a patient's...

The COVID-19 crisis has starkly illustrated both the strengths and limitations of U.S. biomedical innovation institutions as deployed to fight a pandemic. These innovation institutions include not just intellectual property law, but also other legal systems that structure incentives for...

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...

Efforts to reduce inefficient healthcare spending are prevalent across the developed world. Among available policy options, the substitution of brand name for generic drugs is of particular interest because it can deliver large savings without objective quality sacrifices. These policies are...

Governments worldwide are increasingly concerned about the booming CBD (cannabidiol) products. However, little is known about the impact of their liberalization. We study a unique case of unintended liberalization of a CBD-based product (light cannabis) that occurred in Italy in 2017. Using...

The Food and Drug Administration currently does not monitor drug prices. As FDA leaders note, the agency's responsibility is for drug safety and efficacy, and besides they do not want to become embroiled in drug pricing controversies. However, monitoring drug pricing can be useful beyond any...

The Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) created rewards for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) if it can meet goals related to the duration of the 'formal review stage' of the drug development process. Later, the Medical Device User Fee and Modernization Act (MDUFMA) set up a similar...