4 research outputs found
Assessment of impediments to competition in the pharmaceutical sector in Jamaica : supplementary volume; comparative in vitro dissolution and biopharmaceutical properties of some multi-source antihypertensive drug products marketed in Jamaica
A study has been done on the biopharmaceutical properties of antihypertensive drug
products marketed in Jamaica. Four pharmacological classes of antihypertensive drugs were
selected: Beta blocker (Atenolol), Angiotensine Converting Enzyme inhibitors (ACEI), Diuretics
and Central Alpha Blocker (Methyldopa).
Products were tested for uniformity of weight, content of active ingredients (assay) and
dissolution rates, following the British Pharmacopoeia/USP procedures.
It was observed that products contained the required level of active ingredients. However, some
products make the active ingredient available for absorption faster and to a greater extend than
others.
Results generally suggest that more than company reputation and cost is required for making
rational decisions on drug product selection
How Effective is European Merger Control?
This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large
concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger
control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of
four maintained assumptions, merger control might be interpreted to be effective if rents accruing
due to the increased market power observed around the merger announcement are reversed by the
antitrust decision, i.e. if there is a negative relation between announcement and decision abnormal
returns. To clearly identify the events' competitive effects, we explicitly control for the market
expectation about the outcome of the merger control procedure and run several robustness checks
to assess the role of our maintained assumptions. We find that only outright prohibitions
completely reverse the rents measured around a merger's announcement. On average, remedies
seem to be only partially capable of reverting announcement abnormal returns. Yet they seem to be
more effective when applied during the first rather than the second investigation phase and in
subsamples where our assumptions are more likely to hold. Moreover, the European Commission
appears to learn over time. (authors' abstract