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...

I evaluate how the probability of substitution of a prescribed drug in a pharmacy depends on the pharmacists' profits and patients' out of pocket costs. I use Finnish population-wide data covering all prescriptions of three popular antidepressants. I find that one euro increase in the total...

We exploit a large-scale natural experiment – the rollout of a nationwide electronic prescribing system in Finland – to study how digitization of prescriptions affects pharmaceutical use and health outcomes. We use comprehensive administrative data from patients treated with benzodiazepines,...

Poor information flows hamper coordination, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions in health care. We examine the effects of a nationwide policy of information integration on the quality of prescribing. We use the rollout of an electronic prescribing system in Finland and prescription-level...

This paper studies whether and how banks' technological innovations affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. We first provide a theoretical model in which banks' technological innovation relaxes firms' earning-based bor rowing constraints and thereby enlarges the response...

This paper studies whether and how banks' technological innovations affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. We first provide a theoretical model in which banks' technological innovation relaxes firms' earning-based borrowing constraints and thereby enlarges the response...

We study a competitive banking sector in which banks choose the level of risk of their asset portfolios and, upon the public disclosure of stress test results, raise funding by promising investors a repayment. We show that competition forces banks to choose risky assets so as to promise...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

Economic interest in innovation policy largely arises from the fundamental importance of innovation to social welfare and from well-known inefficiencies in innovation in a competitive market environment. As a result, a wide variety of public innovation policies are used in practice. This report...