Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a U.S. government-led program to accelerate the development, production, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. The program cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a...

During World War II, the U.S. Committee on Medical Research (CMR) undertook an integrated, cross-sectoral effort to develop medical science and technology for war, representing the U.S. government's first substantial investment in medical research. Using data on all CMR research contracts, we...

The interaction between product market competition, R&D investment, and the financing choices of R&D-intensive firms on the development of innovative products is only partially understood. To motivate empirical hypotheses about this interaction, we develop a model which predicts that as...

While most economists believe that public scientific research fuels industry innovation and economic growth, systematic evidence supporting this relationship is surprisingly limited. In a recent study, Acemoglu and Linn (2004) identified market size as a significant driver of drug innovation in...

The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

What is the interaction between competition, R&D investments, and the financing choices of R&D-intensive firms? Motivated by existing theories, we hypothesize that as competition increases, R&D-intensive firms will: (1) increase R&D investment relative to assets-in-place that support existing...

This paper summarizes four stylized facts about the prescription drug markets after patent expiration during the 80s: (i) generic firms entered the market at different points of time after patent expiration and they seldom exited; (ii) the brand-name price remained much higher than generic prices,...

This paper studies price determination in pharmaceutical markets using data for 25 countries, six years and a comprehensive list of products from the MIDAS IMS database. We show that market power and the quality of the product has a significantly positive impact of prices. The nationality of the...

This short article summarizes FTC v. Actavis, the first case in which the Supreme Court analyzed the antitrust legality of agreements by which brand-name drug companies pay generics to settle patent litigation and delay entering the market. It concludes that the ruling must be counted as a win...