Essays on innovation in health care markets

This thesis consists of three chapters on innovation in health care markets. The first chapter examines incentives in pharmaceutical innovation; the second explores selection in the response to recommendations in health care. The third chapter presents new evidence on determinants of recent drug overdose mortality. The first chapter examines the effect of financial incentives on reported drug efficacy in clinical trials. I leverage the insight that the exact same sets of drugs are often compared in different randomized control trials conducted by parties with different financial interests. I estimate that a drug appears 0.15 standard deviations more effective when the trial is sponsored by that drug's manufacturer, compared with the same drug in the same trial without the drug manufacturer's involvement. Publication bias explains a large share of this effect; observable characteristics of trial design and patient enrollment are less important.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Oostrom, Tamar.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Amy Finkelstein, Heidi Williams and James Poterba.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127035

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127035