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...

(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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

This volume is part of the response to the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on international drug policy and the emergence of analysis of international drug policy in academic literature. Editors David Bewley-Taylor and Khalid Tinasti, both respected authors in their own right,...

A non-trivial fraction of people cannot afford to buy pharmaceutical products at unregulated market prices. This paper analyses the public insurance of a patent-protected pharmaceutical product in terms of price controls and socially optimal third-degree price discrimination. First, the paper...

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...