Financing Pharmaceutical Innovation: When Should Poor Countries Contribute?

We use a public economics framework to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the R&D incentive comes from sales revenues. We employ familiar techniques of public finance to adjust standard pricing prescriptions in the context of global diseases, in which distributional inequities are extreme. With these adjustments, poor countries should not necessarily cover even their own marginal costs, and the pricing structure is not related to that which would be chosen by a monopolist in a simple way. We use this framework to examine on-going debates regarding the international patent system as embodied in the WTO's TRIPS agreement.Pharmaceutical pricing, Ramsey pricing, TRIPS

Producing an Improved Geographic Profile of Poverty: Methodology and Evidence from Three Developing Countries

Poverty measurement, Poverty profiles, Spatial distribution, Forecasting models, Statistical inference

Patent suits: do they distort research incentives?

This paper shows that the process of enforcing patent rights both dilutes and distorts Research and Development (R&D) incentives. We examine the characteristics of litigated patents by combining, for the first time, information about patent case filings from the US district courts with detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. By comparing filed cases to a random sample of US patents from the same cohorts and technology areas, we show that case filings are much more common in some technology areas than in others, and also when (i) innovations are more valuable, (ii) they appear to form the basis of a sequence of technologically-linked innovations held by the patentee, (iii) there is domestic ownership, and (iv) they are owned by individuals, except in cases where others are active in the same technology area making reputation important. We use this empirical evidence to examine hypotheses about the determinants of patent suits

Patent Suits: Do They Distort Research Incentives?

This paper shows that the process of enforcing patent rights both dilutes and distorts Research and Development (R&D) incentives. We examine the characteristics of litigated patents by combining, for the first time, information about patent case filings from the US district courts with detailed data from the US Patent and Trademark Office. By comparing filed cases to a random sample of US patents from the same cohorts and technology areas, we show that case filings are much more common in some technology areas than in others, and also when (i) innovations are more valuable, (ii) they appear to form the basis of a sequence of technologically-linked innovations held by the patentee, (iii) there is domestic ownership, and (iv) they are owned by individuals, except in cases where others are active in the same technology area making reputation important. We use this empirical evidence to examine hypotheses about the determinants of patent suits.Litigation; Patents; R&D incentives