While it is common for United Nations member states in international meetings to espouse ‘public health approaches’ to drug policy, actual policies appear not to have caught up with this rhetoric. There is a lingering over-emphasis in narcotic drug policies on policing and incarceration at...

Access to controlled medications is problematic in many countries, in spite of the objectives of the international substance control conventions. The review describes barriers for accessing medications and how to assess the adequacy of opioid analgesic consumption globally. As current trends in...

This article examines the market power of branded prescription drugs faced with generic competition. Using prescription-level and matched socioeconomic panel data of the entire Swedish population between 2010 and 2016, I provide evidence for the key role of switching costs. A discontinuity...

Drug overdose deaths, primarily due to opioid addiction, have devastated communities in almost every area of the U.S. The economic impacts of the crisis include additional healthcare resources, unemployment, lost productivity, criminal justice costs, and other indirect impacts that have not yet...

A novel coronavirus was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) in China on 31 December 2019. The WHO named the disease COVID-19 on 11 February 2020. As of 26 February 2020, the disease has been detected on all continents, except for Antarctica. Daily updates on COVID-19 since early...

This paper investigates price patterns of off-patent pharmaceuticals in Sweden. I show that price dynamics are dependent on the number of competitors in the market. The price patterns follow predictions from a model of dynamic price competition in which the demand for pharmaceuticals...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to address the problem of designing pharmaceutical copayments. The rationale for positive copayments in our setting lies in the presence of budgetary constraints and, hence, in the need to raise funds in order to finance the costs of the treatments. We...

Pharmaceutical firms spend increasing amounts in mergers and acquisitions (M&As), which raises the question of whether sufficient investment is left after mergers to further develop firms' internal drug development capability. We evaluate the effects of M&As on firms' post-merger R&D...

In the pharmaceutical industry, firms frequently engage in licensing agreements to overcome innovation challenges and keep up with the pace of developing new drugs. Licensing helps firms jointly develop new drugs and acquire external knowledge, which helps improve their internal drug...

The UNGASS process and the SDGs discussions renewed thinking on illicit drug economy and sustainable development linkages, and opened windows for enhanced policy coherence in that sense. Yet, the fragmentation of the drug policy arena and the complex SDGs task still question whether this will be...

The concept of alternative development (AD) in international drug control has evolved over the past four decades, with several major milestones between the two United Nations General Assembly Special Sessions on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS) 1998 and 2016. However, it was not until UNGASS 2016...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...