Comparing the safety of prescription drugs over time is difficult due to the paucity of reliable quantitative measures of drug safety. Both the academic literature and popular press have focused on drug withdrawals as a proxy for breakdowns in the drug safety system. This metric, however, is...

Comparing the safety of prescription drugs over time is difficult due to the paucity of reliable quantitative measures of drug safety. Both the academic literature and popular press have focused on drug withdrawals as a proxy for breakdowns in the drug safety system. This metric, however, is...

FDA-approval times have declined significantly since the enactment of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) in 1992. As a result, present value expected returns to pharmaceutical R&D have likely increased. In the current paper we employ a unique survey dataset, which includes for the first...