The Impact of Price Regulation on the Launch Delay of New Drugs - Evidence from Twenty-Five Major Markets in the 1990s

This study analyzes the effect of pharmaceutical price regulation on delays in new drug launches. Because low price in one market may 'spill-over' to others, though parallel trade and external referencing, manufacturers may rationally prefer longer delay or non-launch to accepting a low price. We use a Cox proportional hazard model to analyze the launch experience in 25 major markets of 85 new chemical entities (NCEs) launched in the UK or US between 1994 and 1998. There are 1,167 observed launches, or about 55% of the maximum. The US leads with 73 launches, followed by Germany (66) and the UK (64). Only 13 NCEs launched in Japan, 26 in Portugal and 28 in New Zealand. Countries with fewer launches also have longer average launch lags. The launch hazard is positively related to expected price and to expected volume, controlling for income per capita. The originator firm(s) characteristics, specifically, launch in home country and global experience, also significantly reduce launch delay. Within the EU, likely parallel export countries have the most negative effects. Our results suggest that countries with lower expected prices or smaller expected market size experience longer delays in new drug access, controlling for per capita income and other country and firm characteristics.

Intellectual Property and Marketing

Patent protection spurs innovation by raising the rewards for research, but it usually results in less desirable allocations after the innovation has been discovered. In effect, patents reward inventors with inefficient monopoly power. However, previous analysis of intellectual property has focused only on the costs patents impose by restricting price-competition. We analyze the potentially important but overlooked role played by competition on dimensions other than price. Compared to a patent monopoly, competitive firms may engage in inefficient levels of non-price competition -- such as marketing -- when these activities confer benefits on competitors. Patent monopolies may thus price less efficiently, but market more efficiently than competitive firms. We measure the empirical importance of this issue, using patent-expiration data for the US pharmaceutical industry from 1990 to 2003. Contrary to what is predicted by price competition alone, we find that patent expirations actually have a negative effect on output for the first year after expiration. This results from the reduction in marketing effort, which offsets the reduction in price. The short-run decline in output costs consumers at least $400,000 per month, for each drug. In the long-run, however, expirations do raise output, but the value of expiration to consumers is about 15% lower than would be predicted by a model that considers price-competition alone, without marketing effort. The non-standard effects introduced by non-price competition alter the analysis of patents' welfare effects.

Angle-resolved photoemission studies of the superconducting gap symmetry in Fe-based superconductors

The superconducting gap is the fundamental parameter that characterizes the superconducting state, and its symmetry is a direct consequence of the mechanism responsible for Cooper pairing. Here we discuss about angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of the superconducting gap in the Fe-based high-temperature superconductors. We show that the superconducting gap is Fermi surface dependent and nodeless with small anisotropy, or more precisely, a function of momentum. We show that while this observation is inconsistent with weak coupling approaches for superconductivity in these materials, it is well supported by strong coupling models and global superconducting gaps. We also suggest that the strong anisotropies measured by other probes sensitive to the residual density of states are not related to the pairing interaction itself, but rather emerge naturally from the smaller lifetime of the superconducting Cooper pairs that is a direct consequence of the momentum dependent interband scattering inherent to these materials.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Disorder Enhanced Spin Polarization in Diluted Magnetic Semiconductors

We present a theoretical study of diluted magnetic semiconductors that includes spin-orbit coupling within a realistic host band structure and treats explicitly the effects of disorder due to randomly substituted Mn ions. While spin-orbit coupling reduces the spin polarization by mixing different spin states in the valence bands, we find that disorder from Mn ions enhances the spin polarization due to formation of ferromagnetic impurity clusters and impurity bound states. The disorder leads to large effects on the hole carriers which form impurity bands as well as hybridizing with the valence band. For Mn doping 0.01 < x < 0.04, the system is metallic with a large effective mass and low mobility

Measurement of collective flow in heavy ion collisions using particle pair correlations

We present a new type of flow analysis, based on a particle-pair correlation function, in which there is no need for an event-by-event determination of the reaction plane. Consequently, the need to correct for dispersion in an estimated reaction plane does not arise. Our method also offers the option to avoid any influence from particle misidentification. Using this method, streamer chamber data for collisions of Ar+KCl and Ar+BaI2 at 1.2 GeV/nucleon are compared with predictions of a nuclear transport model

Spin-Fluctuation-Induced Non-Fermi-Liquid Behavior with suppressed superconductivity in LiFe1−x_{1-x}Cox_{x}As

A series of LiFe$_{1-x}$Co$_{x}$As compounds with different Co concentrations have been studied by transport, optical spectroscopy, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance. We observed a Fermi liquid to non-Fermi liquid to Fermi liquid (FL-NFL-FL) crossover alongside a monotonic suppression of the superconductivity with increasing Co content. In parallel to the FL-NFL-FL crossover, we found that both the low-energy spin fluctuations and Fermi surface nesting are enhanced and then diminished, strongly suggesting that the NFL behavior in LiFe$_{1-x}$Co$_{x}$As is induced by low-energy spin fluctuations which are very likely tuned by Fermi surface nesting. Our study reveals a unique phase diagram of LiFe$_{1-x}$Co$_{x}$As where the region of NFL is moved to the boundary of the superconducting phase, implying that they are probably governed by different mechanisms.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

Orbital Characters Determined from Fermi Surface Intensity Patterns using Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy

In order to determine the orbital characters on the various Fermi surface pockets of the Fe-based superconductors Ba$_{0.6}$K$_{0.4}$Fe$_{2}$As$_{2}$ and FeSe$_{0.45}$Te$_{0.55}$, we introduce a method to calculate photoemission matrix elements. We compare our simulations to experimental data obtained with various experimental configurations of beam orientation and light polarization. We show that the photoemission intensity patterns revealed from angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of Fermi surface mappings and energy-momentum plots along high-symmetry lines exhibit asymmetries carrying precious information on the nature of the states probed, information that is destroyed after the data symmetrization process often performed in the analysis of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy data. Our simulations are consistent with Fermi surfaces originating mainly from the $d_{xy}$, $d_{xz}$ and $d_{yz}$ orbitals in these materials.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Figures modified, typos corrected, appendix adde