Pharmaceuticals
Antitrust Enforcement Is Not Enough to Address Anticompetitive Conduct in Pharmaceutical Markets. Market-Oriented Legal Reform is Needed.
Federal antitrust enforcement has been robust and effective in promoting prescription drug market competition and thereby enhancing consumer welfare. Antitrust enforcement in...
Preventing Drug Shortages and Saving Lives: The Role of Quality and Reliability Standards
Prescription drug shortages have become more common in recent years, interrupting usual medical care and increasing patient risk and system costs, but...
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...
“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...
"The Pharmaceutical Industry Has a Large Amount of Control Over the Field of Oncology"
In the second part of our two-part interview with Daniel Goldstein, MD, an oncologist who studies the influence of business interests on healthcare, we talk...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation
The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.
Economic History
How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism
In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.
Antitrust and Competition
The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect
In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.
Antitrust and Competition
The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses
Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.
Commentary
We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry
Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.
