Essays on the Economics of Pharmaceuticals and Infectious Disease

Abstract

This thesis examines the economics of pharmaceuticals and infectious disease. Both topics involve myriad market imperfections and externalities; policies in these areas benefit from careful theoretical and empirical economic analyses. The first chapter investigates the impact of drug manufacturers’ copayment coupons on drug prices and demand. Copayment coupons reduce patients’ out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and have become ubiquitous among branded drugs, but their overall effects on drug costs and utilization are not well understood. The second chapter quantifies the effects of shutdown policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic on unemployment; these economic costs are a key factor in debates on public health policies imposing economic restrictions. In this chapter, we develop approaches to discern the effects of various policies using high-frequency data. The third chapter focuses on the effects of antibiotic stewardship on health outcomes. It presents novel empirical evidence on the effect of stewardship on antibiotic resistance in the United States and introduces a model of how stewardship policies and innovation incentives affect antibiotic demand, resistance, innovation, and mortality.