FISHER and TEMIN (1973) have argued recently that many empirical studies1 re-lating to the Schumpeterian hypothesis are in-appropriate for testing that hypothesis. They

A computer simulation model in the tradition of evolutionary models of technical change is developed in this paper. It focuses on R&D competition in new product introductions and is based on data for the U. S. pharmaceutical industry during the 1970s. The sensitivity of innovation levels to the rate of generic competition, regulatory review time, and patent life is examined in the computer simulation experiments. These factors are found to have significant long-run effects on industry structure and innovation levels.

Academic researchers, as well as pharmaceutical firms themselves, often use the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to estimate a firm's cost of capital. But the CAPM implicitly assumes that cash flows follow a random walk. This assumption is inconsistent with our finding that large U.S.-based pharmaceutical firms' cash flow growth rates display either momentum or mean-reversion. We show that growth rate momentum implies: (1) the systematic risk of a project increases monotonically with time to maturity of the cash flows; and (2) longer duration projects require a higher cost of capital. One of the practical implications of our results is that the traditional CAPM underestimates the cost of capital for some pharmaceutical firms by as much as 2.8%. These findings are quite relevant for the policy debate about the high rates of return earned by pharmaceutical companies, which some claim are pure rents and are not necessary to attract investors. Our theoretical and empirical analysis shows that high returns are often required to compensate for the higher systematic risk of long-duration pharmaceutical cash flows.

N thi's paper we describe an econometric model of the American tobacco industry for the period 1949 through 1966. The model contains 19 equations and is divided into three major blocks - (1) leaf production, (2) leaf price, and (3) cigarettes. The objective is to explain the behavior of the tobacco industry over an 18-year period. Ultimately, we hope to use the model to perform policy simulation experiments to evaluate the effects of alternative governmental and managerial policies on the behavior of the industry. We begin with a brief description of the industry. Next we discuss the theoretical specification of the model and the statistically estimated equations. We conclude with some example simulation results which provide additional evidence of the validity of the model for explaining the behavior of the tobacco industry over the period 1949 through 1966

Do threats of pharmaceutical price regulation affect subsequent research and development (R&D) spending? This study uses the Clinton administration’s Health Security Act (HSA) of 1993 as a natural experiment to study this issue. We link events surrounding the HSA to pharmaceutical stock price changes and then examine the cross-sectional relation between firms’ stock price changes and their subsequent unexpected R&D spending changes. Results show that the HSA had significant negative effects on stock prices and firm-level R&D spending. Conservatively, the HSA reduced R&D spending by about $1 billion even though it never became law.