Pharmaceutical companies

How Pfizer’s Vaccine Announcement Demonstrates the Political Power of Firms

By timing the disclosure of the results of its vaccine trial, Pfizer could have influenced the 2020 presidential election. This is worrisome...

Regulators Should Keep a Close Eye on the Little Guys in the Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine

As the race to find a Covid-19 vaccine or treatment rages on, many have raised concerns over trustworthiness of clinical research and...

Paid to Show the Drug Works: Why “Blind” Clinical Trials for New Drugs are Far Less Blind Than They Should Be

New research shows that physicians in industry-sponsored trials are more captured by pharmaceutical companies than physicians in unsponsored ones.

The Amazon of Health Care: How CVS Is Evolving From a Drug Store Chain into a Tech Platform

CVS is built on a dominant chain of drug stores, but it is now trying to turn itself into a "uniquely powerful platform" for...

The Rise of the Opioids: How Purdue Invented New Markets for OxyContin

Purdue's strategy was to market its opioids directly to patients via brochures, videos, advertisements, and the internet. It also provided information to doctors and...

Purdue Circumvented the Regulator to Promote OxyContin, Hiding Its Real Risk of Addiction

In 2001, the Food and Drug Administration required Purdue to change OxyContin’s patient package inserts to make addiction risks more evident. The company altered...

“Short Sellers Don't Exist to Fix the Problems. They Exist to Shed Light on the Problems”

In an interview with ProMarket, Fahmi Quadir, the short seller whose bet against Valeant in 2015 helped expose the company's misdeeds, talks about short...

Editors’ Briefing: On Our Radar This Week (March 3-March 10)

This week in political economy.     ProPublica has created a searchable database of 2,475 political appointees by the Trump administration, the result of “a year...

The Secret Driver of US Health Care Costs: Politicians Wanting to Get Reelected

A pioneering new study provides a first-of-its-kind look into the outsized effect that lobbying and political maneuverings have on health care spending. Americans spend significantly more...

Perverse Market Incentives Encourage High Prescription Drug Prices

Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are the under-discussed market participants who manage prescription drug insurance for the vast majority of Americans. PBMs claim to be a lone...

LATEST NEWS

Creation over Time in Copyright and Patent

On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided two intellectual property cases with two seemingly different results. A closer look, however, reveals a complimentary concern with the monopolistic power of first movers and how the legal system should enable innovation from second movers over time, writes Randy Picker.

ESG Standards’ Good, Bad and Ugly

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a virtual event discussing the standards, metrics and disclosures of investments focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. The following is a transcript of the event.

Reregulate.

Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.

A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.