(1) Background: Any disturbance in the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) can disrupt the supply of medicines and affect the efficiency of health systems. Due to shortages in the global pharma supply chain over the past few years and the complex nature of free trade and its limitations when...

Competition law may play an important role in drug pricing control by containing high prices derived from economic violations. Since the use of competition tools is not limited by the TRIPS Agreement or other international binding disciplines, there is ample policy room to explore how countries,...

I use variation in approval time for generic drugs to shed light on the objectives of the federal agency in charge of granting entry permission for these drugs (FDA). Applications belonging to firms later found to have engaged in fraud or corruption were approved nine months faster on average,...

This paper examines the optimal content regulation of DTCA by comparing two forms of DTCA-product-specific and category-specific-and identifies a key tradeoff which underlies this policy debate. Our analysis suggests that the optimal form of DTCA depends crucially on the cost effectiveness of...

Policy makers use reference pricing to curb pharmaceutical expenditures by reducing coverage of expensive branded drugs. In a theoretical analysis we show that the net effect of reference pricing is generally ambiguous when accounting for entry by generic producers. Reference pricing shifts...

Entry represents a fundamental threat to cartels engaged in price fixing. We study the extent and effect of this behavior in the largest price fixing case in US history, which involves generic drugmakers. To do so, we link information on the cartel’s internal operations to regulatory filings...

One approach that antitrust enforcement authorities use to address potentially anticompetitive mergers is to seek divestitures in specific, competitively problematic overlap markets while allowing the rest of the merger to consummate. We evaluate the efficacy of this approach by studying...

The outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China and the lockdown that followed had disrupted the supply of APIs and their intermediates and starting materials to India, leading to a temporary restriction on export of certain medicines from India. The PLI scheme that was announced subsequently aimed at...

Efforts to reduce inefficient healthcare spending are prevalent across the developed world. Among available policy options, the substitution of brand name for generic drugs is of particular interest because it can deliver large savings without objective quality sacrifices. These policies are...

Development of advanced drug nanocarriers that can improve cancer thermotherapeutic efficacy, reduce side effect and drug resistance is of particular interests. In this work, pure and crystalline boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs) were synthesized by a NaCl-template reaction with the yield over 1...

The problem of high pharmaceutical drug prices is a permanent object of global political debate. Nowadays this debate encompasses many different types of drugs, from innovative products and biologics to generic ones. Antitrust enforcement has traditionally targeted anticompetitive behaviour in...

Pharmaceutical drug analysis (PDA), besides quantifying drugs and related substances (RS), can enrich drug discovery (DD) by suggesting new leads. PDA may be extended towards comparative in-silico predictions for drugs and RS. This may lead to the assessment of drug likeliness of nontoxic RS as...

Background: The aim was: i) to quantify the direct and indirect savings from parallel imports in Sweden during a period when sellers were forbidden from giving discounts to pharmacies, and ii) to study if the efects of competition from parallel imports on list prices became smaller in absolute...

For nearly 3 years now, Lebanon has been assailed by compounded crises. With the economic instability, the coronavirus pandemic, and the explosion of the Beirut Port on August 4, 2020; the fragile Lebanese healthcare system has found itself at massive risk of a catastrophic public health crisis...

Background: Well-functioning competitive markets are key to controlling generic drug prices. This is important since over 90% of all drugs sold in the US are generics. Recently, there have been examples of large price increases in the generic market. Methods: This paper examines price...

More than other EU 'Unions', the proposed Health Union requires proper definition because the EU's competences are limited in this domain.

We study cartels that operated in the US generic drug industry, leveraging quarterly Medicaid data from 2011-2018 and a difference-in-differences approach comparing the evolution of prices of allegedly collusive drugs with a group of competitive control drugs. Our analysis highlights (i) the...

This Article makes the case that pharmaceutical companies, along with other powerful corporate actors in the pharmaceutical industry, are in effect designing their own markets, often at the expense of, rather than in pursuit of, public health. The influence exerted by these corporate actors...

Competition law may play an important role in drug pricing control by containing high prices derived from economic violations. Since the use of competition tools is not limited by the TRIPS Agreement or other international binding disciplines, there is ample policy room to explore how countries,...

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...

Die COVID-19-Pandemie ist das beherrschende Thema der letzten 18 Monate gewesen. Die Impfung gegen COVID-19 ist nach wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis als der Ausweg anzusehen. Der Beitrag verdeutlicht, dass die mit COVID-19 zusammenhängende Impfstrategie in drei Phasen einzuteilen ist, wobei...

Background: Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) manufacturing is an important segment of the Indian pharma industry. India ranks third in terms of volume of medicines produced, and is a major global supplier of generic medicines. However, India depends heavily on the import of several raw...

Empirical studies suggest that entry of generic competitors results in minimal decreases or even increases in brand-name drug prices as well as sharp declines in brand-name advertising. This paper examines circumstances under which this empirical pattern could be observed. The analysis focuses...

When the Medicare program was created in 1965, outpatient prescription drugs were left out of the benefit package, a decision that maintained consistency with standard private insurance plans of the time. Cost was one factor behind the exclusion, but a more fundamental reason related to the role...

We study the economic and political effects of competition by state-owned firms, leveraging the decentralized entry of public pharmacies to local markets in Chile around local elections. Public pharmacies sell drugs at a third of private pharmacy prices, because of a stronger upstream bargaining...

We examine the role of consumption externalities in the demand for pharmaceuticals at both the brand level and over a therapeutic class of drugs. These effects emerge when use of a drug by others affects its value, and/or conveys information abut efficacy and safety to patients and physicians....

With substantial fixed costs of drug development, more common conditions can support more products. If additional pharmaceutical products are beneficial, they will attract greater consumption and promote better health, e.g. greater longevity. We ask how market size measured by condition...

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms' pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called "index pricing" for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the existing...

Biosimilars are close copies of biologic drugs, a group of complex pharmaceutical products that cannot be exactly replicated. The United States Congress passed regulation promoting biosimilar entry in 2010. Since then, the FDA has approved more than 30 biosimilars. We study how the entry of...

We examine the issue of new goods and price indexes for the important and tractable case of generic and branded drugs. By treating generics as entirely distinct goods and "linking them in" to indexes with fixed weights, the standard price indexes fail to reflect the substantial welfare gains to...

This paper examines why physicians continue to prescribe trade- name drugs when less expensive generic substitutes are available. I utilize a data set on physicians, their patients, and the multi-source drugs prescribed to study the prescription habits of physicians in prescribing generic and...