In this paper we document a process of price convergence in the European market for pharmaceutical products and relate it to access to innovative medicines in individual countries. The EU is a peculiar case study, where free circulation of goods coexists with pricing policies designed and...

Physicians’ generic pharmaceutical adoption involves not only patients’ and insurance payers’ cost, but also their own interests. This study examines this double agency problem for physicians by using Taiwanese data because two of its institutional features: First, patients and physicians...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and...

In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former situation involved a pair of centrally-placed trading...

This manuscript addresses how developing countries can maximize access to essential medicines and minimize unwanted side-effects within the legal environment of a compulsory license regime. This paper offers various solutions that developing nations can implement that would improve consumer...

Shortages and rationing are common in health care, yet we know little about the consequences. We examine an 18-month shortage of the pediatric Haemophilus Influenzae Type B (Hib) vaccine. Using insurance claims data and variation in shortage exposure across birth cohorts, we find that the...

A booster of the COVID-19 vaccine targeting the prevailing Omicron variant did not become available in the United States until a year after the variant was first detected. This pattern of developing, testing, and distributing a variant-specific booster may become the default response to further...