The increasing demand for rigor in empirical economics has led to the growing use of auxiliary tests (balance, specification, over-identification, placebo, etc.) supporting the credibility of a paper's main results. We dub these "sniff tests" because standards for passing are subjective and...

We prove that, for general demand and cost conditions and market structures, the fraction of first-best surplus that a monopolist is unable to extract in a market provides a tight upper bound on the relative distortions arising from firms' equilibrium decisions at all margins (entry and...

We derive the optimal funding mechanism to incentivize development and production of vaccines against diseases with epidemic potential. In the model, suppliers' costs are private information and investments are noncontractible, precluding cost-reimbursement contracts, requiring fixed-price...

Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of such vaccines, ensure distribution to children in low-income countries, and pilot the AMC...

Millions of people are being vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 every day, but the virus is also mutating and spreading fast. Vaccine production is increasing, but supply still constrains vaccinations worldwide. Using lower doses of vaccines could dramatically accelerate vaccination. Available...

We argue that alternative COVID-19 vaccine dosing regimens could potentially dramatically accelerate global COVID-19 vaccination and reduce mortality, and that the costs of testing these regimens are dwarfed by their potential benefits. We first use the high correlation between neutralizing...

Vaccines exert a positive externality, reducing spread of disease from the consumer to others, providing a rationale for subsidies. We study how optimal subsidies vary with disease characteristics by integrating a standard epidemiological model into a vaccine market with rational economic...

Our previous paper (McCabe and Snyder 2014) contained the provocative result that, despite a positive average effect, open access reduces cites to some articles, in particular those published in lower-tier journals. We propose a model in which open access leads more readers to acquire the full...

Advance market commitments (AMCs) provide a mechanism to stimulate investment by suppliers of products to low-income countries. In an AMC, donors commit to a fund from which a specified subsidy is paid per unit purchased by low-income countries until the fund is exhausted, strengthening...

Vaccinating the world's population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procurement. We find that if the goal is to...