Showing posts with label Chicago Price Theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Price Theory. Show all posts

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Supply and Demand Curves with the "Wrong" Slope

"Personal Increasing Returns" is a way to describe goods for which consumers can purchase access to a lower price.  An important instance is human capital, where consumers reduce the leisure-opportunity cost of consumption by investing in skills.  Another is consumer financial management, which Sala-i-Martin and I studied in this JPE paper about purchasing access to cheaper future consumption.  The demand for illegal drugs can also be understood in this way.  


It's one model with various variable labels.  A marginal cost curve sloping the "wrong" way unifies the applications.  My purpose here is to compare and contrast this and other non-trivial instances of wrong-sloping supply and demand curves.


The “supply” curves shown in Figures 2 and 5 of "Personal Increasing Returns" are closely related to what price theory has traditionally described as “forward-falling supply curves.”  Examples are Marshall [Book IV, Chapter XIII] and Adams and Wheeler [1952], although they focus on diminishing marginal cost at the industry level rather than the personal level.[1]  Either way, sufficiently strong complementarities are required. 


[click image to see side-by-side]


Although "Personal Increasing Returns" assumes constant input prices, including the relative price of human capital h, upward-sloping input supply could introduce upward-sloping elements in Figures 2 and 4.  This occurs at quantities where the complementarity between h and q (e.g., human capital and labor supply) is insufficient to offset increasing input prices.  Still, such supply curves are known as forward falling as long as they have a declining portion.  Each quantity has a unique marginal cost, even if each marginal cost does not correspond to a unique quantity.


While Marshall’s formulation with firm-level supply that is a function of industry output may produce a forward-falling industry supply curve, the complementarity could be on the demand side instead.  Becker [1991] posits that a consumer’s demand curve may be shifted out by market-level demand, particularly in markets for “social activities in which people consumer a product or service together and partly in public.”  As a result, the market level demand curve slopes up in the price ranges where the complementarity is sufficiently strong.  In that range, an increase dQ in the market quantity shifts the sum of individual demands even more than dQ due to the social interaction, so price must increase to choke off that additional demand (that is, limit the increase in the sum of demands to dQ).  Still, each quantity on the market-level curve corresponds to a unique price, even though a single price may not correspond to a unique quantity.


The snob-good model is the opposite of Becker’s social interactions in that some of the consumers value the good more when others are not consuming it.  The resulting demand curve may have a backward S shape, with only the elite consuming at the highest prices.  As the price falls enough to induce the general population to consume, enough elites may leave the market to reduce total demand, thereby generating the middle part of the S.  Once enough elite are gone from the market, further price reductions increase market demand.[2]  Unlike Becker’s demand curve, the snob demand model can have multiple market prices corresponding to a single quantity.


The economics of “backward bending” supply curves and the demand for Giffen goods is entirely different.  In those cases, the usual substitution effects on supply or demand are more than offset by income effects.  For the backward-bending supply curve, the supplier’s alternative to production is consumption of a normal good; the classic example is the supply of labor.  A Giffen good has income and substitution effects in opposite directions because it is an inferior good.



[1] Stigler [1949, p. 165] is reluctant to discuss much about forward-falling supply without sufficient demonstration of its importance in practice.  Respecting that principle, "Personal Increasing Returns" points to education decisions, vehicle choice, drugs and alcohol pricing, and other situations where consumer action can significantly affect a price they pay.  Boulding [1955] refers to “falling supply price.”

[2] See also the Veblen [1899] model, algebraic versions of which can be found in Leibenstein [1950]. 


Adams, Robert W. and Wheeler, John T. (1952). "External Economies and the Falling Supply Curve." The Review of Economic Studies 20(1): 24-39.


Becker, Gary S. 1991. "A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price." Journal of Political Economy 99(5): 1109-16.


Boulding, Kenneth E. 1955. Economic Analysis. New York: Harper & Row.


Leibenstein, H. 1950. "Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers' Demand." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 64(2): 183–207.


Marshall, Alfred. 1890. Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan


Stigler, George J. 1949. The Theory of Price. Macmillan.


Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York, NY: Macmillan.


Friday, March 3, 2023

ChatGPT: Marshall, Hicks, or Cliff Clavin?

Marshall discusses his Laws of Derived Demand in his Principles of Economics.  Specifically, in Chapter VI of Book V.

Marshall listed four “conditions” that result in wage-inelastic derived demand for the corresponding factor of production:


  1. “no good substitute being available at moderate price”

  2. “stiff and inelastic” final demand

  3. “small part of the expenses of production” (i.e., small factor-cost share)

  4. Inelastic supply of other factors


Putting aside the fourth law, we can discuss the first three in the context of the Allen-Hicks formula for the own-price elasticity of derived demand, βii, in the two-factor case (see also Chicago Price Theory Chapter 11).





where si is good i’s share in factor cost, εD < 0 is the price-elasticity of demand for the final product, and σ > 0 is the elasticity of factor substitution.  None of these parameters are necessarily constants; they may vary according to the factor allocation.  Marshall’s first law can be understood as a comparative static with respect to σ in the direction of zero, holding constant si and εD.  The second law can be understood as a comparative static with respect to εD holding constant si and σ.  The debated third law is a comparative static with respect to the share parameter, with Hicks at least holding constant εD and σ.


ChatGPT confidently asserts that there are three Marshall’s Laws.  Three is a fair count if we exclude the law that Hicks disputed.  However, by that count, ChapGPT gets them 5/6 incorrect.  Instead, it lists the definition of derived demand, followed by a statement about long versus short run.  The third in its list is perhaps a combination of the disputed third law and the first law.


Mulligan: What are Marshall's Laws of Derived Demand?


ChatGPT: Marshall's Laws of Derived Demand are a set of principles that describe the relationship between the demand for a particular factor of production (such as labor) and the demand for the goods and services that factor helps produce. These laws were developed by economist Alfred Marshall in the late 19th century and are still widely studied and referenced today.


The three laws of derived demand are as follows:


  1. The demand for a factor of production is derived from the demand for the product that the factor helps produce.

  2. The demand for a factor of production is more elastic in the long run than in the short run.

  3. The elasticity of demand for a factor of production depends on its importance in the production process and the availability of substitutes.


Taken together, these laws suggest that the demand for labor, for example, is ultimately determined by the demand for the goods and services that labor helps produce. In the short run, the demand for labor may be relatively inelastic because it can be difficult for firms to quickly adjust their production processes to changes in demand. However, in the long run, firms may be able to find substitutes for labor or change their production methods, making the demand for labor more elastic. The importance of labor in the production process also affects its elasticity of demand: if there are few substitutes for a particular type of labor, its demand may be relatively inelastic.


ChatGPT also confidently discusses the Hicks challenge but refers to a “law” that was not even one of the four.


Mulligan: Didn't Hicks show that Marshall was wrong about one of the laws?


ChatGPT: Yes, economist John Hicks challenged one of Marshall's laws of derived demand, specifically the second law, which states that the demand for a factor of production is more elastic in the long run than in the short run. Hicks argued that this law was not always true and that the elasticity of demand for a factor of production could depend on the specific circumstances.


Hicks pointed out that in some cases, the demand for a factor of production could be more elastic in the short run than in the long run. For example, if a firm has already made significant investments in a particular technology or capital equipment, it may be difficult for the firm to switch to a different production method or substitute other factors of production. In such cases, the demand for the factor of production may be relatively inelastic in the long run, while being more elastic in the short run as firms can adjust their inputs more easily.


Hicks’ critique of Marshall's second law suggests that the relationship between the demand for a factor of production and the goods and services it helps produce is complex and can vary depending on the specific circumstances of the market. Nonetheless, Marshall's laws of derived demand remain an important contribution to economic theory and continue to be studied and debated by economists today.


Next, I asked for sources.  It got the books correct, which is pretty good for ChatGPT (famous for fabricating books and articles) but wrong chapters.  It should be Marshall Book V, Chapter VI.  Hicks’ second edition only has 11 chapters, although perhaps Chapter 12 can be understood as the material that follows Chapter 11 in which case “Chapter 12” is the correct part of the book.


Mulligan: Where did Marshall state the laws?  Where did Hicks challenge one of the laws?


ChatGPT: Alfred Marshall first introduced his laws of derived demand in his seminal work "Principles of Economics," first published in 1890. Marshall's laws are discussed in Book V, Chapter III, where he discusses the theory of distribution and the demand for factors of production.


John Hicks challenged Marshall's second law in his 1932 book "The Theory of Wages." In the book, Hicks argues that the elasticity of demand for factors of production can depend on the specific production technology and market conditions. Hicks specifically critiques Marshall's assumption that the demand for a factor of production is always more elastic in the long run than in the short run. Hicks' critique is discussed in Chapter 12 of his book.


I disputed the citation of Chapter III, so it apologized [not shown here] and cited Chapter VI of Book IV, which purportedly discusses “Distribution of Produce” (the actual title is “Industrial Training”).  More disputes produced more rounds of apology and fake references.  It tended back to Book V, Chapter III (a famous chapter) but with a different fake chapter title at each iteration.


Cliff Clavin was the famous tavern know-it-all in Cheers.  Perhaps Cliff is back, this time behind the curtain of AI spouting lots of jargon in grammatically correct but ignorant sentences. Is Norm somewhere back there too?

John Ratzenberger, 'Cheers' Mailman Cliff Clavin, Delivers a Special  Message about the United States Postal Service - mxdwn Television

[image credit: https://television-b26f.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Cheers-Cliff-Calvin-Screenshot-770x470.png]


Meanwhile, for more than a decade Artificial Intelligence has offered tools that are never self-contradictory and power a good exposition of Marshall’s Laws and much more in economics and statistics.

[Yes, ChatGPT can do the same for coding too: fabricated function options, fake references, etc.]

www.perplexity.ai correctly recited Marshall's four laws, including links to some microeconomics lecture notes. It correctly reported the sources of Marshall's law, and acknowledged that it could not report which chapter. It was incorrect as to which law Hicks challenged.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

How Incumbents Capture Price Controls: Example from the U.S. Senate

U.S. Senators are proposing to put both retail and business-to-business price controls on insulin.  The (intended?) result will that be that consumers will pay more, diabetes complications will get worse, and incumbent manufacturers will make more money.

Drugs generally follow a life cycle.  Unique new drugs often command a high price that soon falls sharply as the incumbent faces competition from alternative therapies and/or generics.  Insulin has the same kind of life cycle.  Two biosimilars (essentially a generic version of a biologic, which is a more complicated type of drug) were quickly approved under one of the new approval pathways created by the Trump Administration that helped bring prices down (explained further in my forthcoming Journal of Law and Economics paper).  Seven more biosimilars are in the approval pipeline and will soon be competing with the incumbents.

The incumbents would like to freeze time before those competitors arrive, and Senators Shaheen and Collins are obliging.  While they advertise freezing the retail price at $35 plus inflation, they will also impose price controls on the business-to-business transactions that new entrants use to break into the market (read more about them in Chapter 10 of http://yourehiredtrump.com, or in Chapter 13 of my favorite textbook, or in the analysis by OACT and CBO).  By hindering the entry and diffusion of the new biosimilars, the price of insulin will not fall as it would have, and usually does over the drug life cycle.

Suppressing competition is exactly what I'd expect Big PhRMA to order up on the Congressional menu (again, see Chapter 10 of http://yourehiredtrump.com).  I am less surprised than anyone to again see PhRMA deploy Karl Marx's rhetorical device (he always decried the "middlemen" of capitalism), "This legislation rightly recognizes the role of insurers and middlemen" as they see a PhRMA-protection bill come together.

Consumers will have less choice and pay more as a result of this bill.  Adherence to diabetes treatments will be worse than it would have been if this bill were not getting in the way of competition.  Low adherence is not just a health problem, but a financial problem too as private and public health plans are saddled with additional hospitalization expenses for treating diabetes complications.

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

New Emissions Regulations are Coercive Paternalism, not Environmental Science, or even Benevolent Paternalism

Trump's CEA showed, based on credit transactions among manufacturers, that vehicle standards to abate a ton of CO2 cost about $163 on the margin, while even Obama said the abatement was worth only $50.  i.e., tightening emissions regulations fails a cost-benefit test by a wide margin.

Now Biden claims that new stricter standards pass a cost benefit test.  Although this will be cast as an environmental issue, the new conclusion is driven by assumptions unrelated to environmental economics or climate science:

(1) Consumer fuel savings get (mostly) double counted because "behavioral economics."  Specifically, 

"The agency’s analysis assumes that potential car and light truck buyers value only the savings in fuel costs from purchasing a higher-MPG model they expect to realize over the first 30 months they own it. Depending on the discount rate buyers are assumed to apply, this amounts to 25-30 percent of the expected savings in fuel costs over its entire lifetime." (p. 420 of DOT's final rule)

This double counting (100 - 27.5% = 72.5% of $98 billion in fuel savings) is more than quadruple the purported $16 billion net benefit shown in Table VI-11 of the final rule.

[I call it double counting because, by the principle of revealed prevalence, fuel savings is already built into the price and sales of fuel-efficient vehicles; many consumers do not purchase such vehicles because of the relative price and characteristics of competing vehicles.  Alternatively, you could say that DOT ignores benefit of low-MPG vehicles, but the revealed-preference result is the same. 

Following an Economics 301 homework solution from October 2019, in December 2020 Trump's CEA provided a vector proof -- that the market price for GHG credits (i) reflects fuel savings as consumers perceive them and (ii) fully quantifies the industry-level real GDP effects of changing GHG standards, without any additional term for fuel savings -- on the White House website.  See the appendix of this document.]

By comparison, the gross climate benefit is purportedly $27.5 billion.  i.e., they would have to more than double their already inflated "social cost of carbon" to push their thumb on the scale as vigorously as they did with "behavioral economics."  See below for more on paternalism.

(2) Biden says that some tightening comes for free because 5 manufacturers had already signed a pledge with California EPA to so tighten

But this ignores that California rules, when followed by just a subset of manufacturers, do not reduce the supply of federal credits, whereas changes in federal rules do even if the federal rules are not as strict as California's.  The equilibrium credit price is built into the prices paid by purchasers of new cars.

(3) When the above are enough to tilt the scale, all costs and benefits are discounted 3%/yr.  When an extra push is needed, Biden discounts environmental benefits at 2.5% per year while everything else is discounted 3%/yr.

"the use of the social rate of return on capital ... inappropriately underestimates the impacts of climate change for the purposes of estimating the SC-GHG. ... the consumption rate of interest is the theoretically appropriate discount rate in an intergenerational context." (p. 547 of the Technical Support Document.  See also p. 573 of the final rule.)


More on coercive paternalism

Trump's DOT and EPA spoke forcefully against paternalism as a justification for fuel standards.  If people lack knowledge, give them the knowledge rather than imposing a decision on them.  Here is how they said it

"the idea that regulating fuel economy and CO2 emissions can mitigate the consequences of inadequate access to information by placing decisions that depend on access to complete information in the hands of regulators rather than buyers has superficial appeal. Yet commenters do not establish that such a drastic step is necessary to overcome any inadequacy of information, or that requiring manufacturers to supply higher fuel economy will be more effective than less intrusive approaches such as expanding the range of information available to buyers." (85 FR 24608, italics added) 

In contrast, Biden's DOT and EPA say nothing like this, but instead extol the purported virtues of "behavioral economics."  They do not mention less intrusive approaches, let alone show why they would have fewer net benefits.

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

How Chicago Economics is Helping End a Pandemic: Interview with Murphy, Philipson, Topel

Covid-19 has disrupted much of human life, but Operation Warp Speed has drastically mitigated the costs of the virus. The $10 billion federal program launched in April 2020 encouraged and accelerated the development and mass manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines, streamlined Federal approval for vaccines and their manufacture, and provided Federal funds for private vaccine research and advance-purchase orders.  COVID-19 vaccines are currently being administered to the general public at least six months earlier than expected.  Vaccinating the population against COVID-19 six months earlier was worth about $1.8 trillion to the U.S. alone in terms of lives saved and accelerating the return to normal schooling, work, socializing, etc. (Mulligan and Philipson 2020).

Operation Warp Speed is a historic milestone for economic research on medical innovation that occurred over decades on the University of Chicago campus.  Chicago’s research results, traditions, and emphasis were brought to the federal government in 2017 by several of its faculty and alumni.  In the three years before COVID-19 came to the United States, that economic team showed the President of the United States how federal policy reforms were delivering real value to consumers by encouraging innovation in healthcare industries.  Also before the pandemic, the team prepared and published a blueprint for vaccine innovation during a pandemic that would become the intellectual foundation for Operation Warp Speed.  This document tells the story of the program’s University of Chicago origins.   The document traces the economics of the program back to underlying UChicago economic principles on regulation generally and health economics specifically, following the contents of a recent video conversation I had with University of Chicago colleagues Kevin M. Murphy, Tomas J. Philipson, and Robert H. Topel.


 

UChicago on Regulatory Barriers in Healthcare

Operation Warp Speed, especially its economic elements, emerges from a large body of UChicago research centered around the unintended consequences of health regulation. Many economic frameworks developed in the Chicago price theory tradition allow for both quantitative work and application across various industries. An early piece by Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler, Roofs or Ceilings? found that housing regulation exacerbated housing problems rather than making them better (Friedman and Stigler 1946).  Stigler would dedicate much of his career to developing the economics of regulation, including the famous “regulatory capture theory.”  As Stigler put it in his 1971 paper, “as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit … regulatory policy will often be so fashioned as to retard the rate of growth of new firms” (Stigler 1971).

A famous 1973 paper by Chicago’s Sam Peltzman applied the entry-barrier theory specifically to the regulation of drugs, vaccines, and medical devices.  He observed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval procedures amounted to industry entry barriers, concluding that “consumer losses from purchases of ineffective drugs or hastily-marketed unsafe drugs appear to have been trivial compared to their gains from innovation” (Peltzman 1973).  Peltzman’s approach was appreciated throughout the profession,[1] including a book from M.I.T. Professor Peter Temin also concluding that FDA delays were too long (Temin 1980).  More recently, Tomas Philipson and Chicago alumnus Eric Sun concluded that FDA pre-market regulation and post-market tort liability acted as a double tax on product development (Philipson and Sun 2008).  With Eric Sun and other coauthors, Philipson conducted cost-benefit analyses of the tradeoff between speed and safety, concluding in 2008 that FDA was putting too much weight on safety.  This work influenced FDA deregulation efforts during the Bush Administration, although that administration continued to be frustrated by the fact that FDA “steadily disregarded many of the [] provisions” of laws intended to get FDA to move faster (Gottlieb 2010).

Regulate or Deregulate?

Philipson joined the Trump Administration in 2017 and Mulligan in 2018, both in its White House Council of Economic Advisers (of which Philipson would ultimately become Acting Chair).  These issues arose immediately in connection with President Trump’s campaign promise to lower prescription drug prices.  He appointed FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who had been critical of FDA delays.  Trump’s economic team, which included Chicago economists Anna Wong, Don Kenkel, Eric Sun, Kevin Corinth, Paula Worthington, Rich Burkhauser and Troy Durie, predicted that deregulation would reduce drug prices because reduced FDA barriers would result in more new drugs and more manufacturers of existing drugs to compete for consumer dollars.  On the other side was Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex M. Azar II, who proposed a “drug pricing blueprint” that would add regulations on everything from television advertisements to business-to-business price controls.  Although deregulation was a pervasive theme in his administration, the President was no ideologue but rather just looking for results.

In a 2018 report that was little noticed at the time (Council of Economic Advisers 2018), CEA laid out and updated Peltzman’s case that FDA regulations are entry barriers that reduce entry and raise prices. It showed that Gottlieb’s deregulation was in fact increasing entry of generic drugs and predicted that lower prices would follow.  The CEA received their first sense of progress on January 10, 2019, with the confidential advance release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for December 2018.  It showed that 2018 was the first calendar year since 1972 that retail prescription drug prices actually fell even though consumer prices generally were increasing.  The CEA composed a message to be posted on the President’s Twitter account the next day.  But this message had to be approved by HHS, which was loathe to release something so contrary to its perceived “need for regulatory action” in the face of purported “prices of existing drugs [that] have been rising in the United States much more rapidly than warranted by inflation or costs” (United States, Department of Health and Human Services).  Mulligan convinced the President’s communication team that the CPI is reliable and is telling us something important.  The President would brag about the result in everything from impromptu press briefings to his State of the Union address.  Although none of us knew what 2020 would bring, the President was also getting valuable experience at, and witnessing results from, removing barriers to medical innovation, especially at the FDA.

 

The Value of Medical Innovation during a Pandemic

UChicago’s Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner founded the field of economic epidemiology, which emphasized that the costs of a contagious disease are not limited to the health losses of those who contract the disease because many others upend their lives in order to stay healthy (Posner and Philipson 1993).  In 2006, Kevin M. Murphy and Robert Topel’s “Value of Health and Longevity” assessed the valuation of improvements in health expenditures and their policy implications (Murphy and Topel 2006).  This study calculated the value of innovations that occurred in the past, the potential value that can occur in the future from reducing the incidence, and the mortality of various diseases.  They even looked at the value of innovation to reduce mortality from contagious respiratory diseases, of which COVID-19 proved to be an example.  Gary Becker, Tomas Philipson, and Rodrigo Soares estimated the health component of economic growth associated with the value of health improvements (Becker, Philipson and Soares 2015).  Part of Becker’s UChicago course on human capital looked at the value of preventing a worldwide pandemic (Jaffe, Minton, Mulligan and Murphy 2019).

Chicago’s emphasis on medical innovation profoundly influenced the White House economic team.  Judging from the 74 Economic Reports of the President (ERPs) published since the Truman Administration, no economic team gave so much attention to medical innovation.  The 2018 ERP had a full chapter about the health sector, half of which was about "Improving People’s Health through More Access to Medical Innovations" and "Encouraging Innovation, and Making It Affordable."  The 2019 ERP (p. 18) cites FDA deregulation as one of the highlights of the year and devotes twelve pages to how FDA reforms increased competition and reduced prescription drug prices.  The same report also looks at the possible negative innovation effects of a proposed Federal ban on for-profit healthcare.

The 2020 ERP updated the status of the FDA reforms in its chapter about deregulation, its chapter about healthcare, and its chapter about competition policy.  It also cited the new Right to Try law and relaxed regulatory barriers to treating chronic kidney disease (Council of Economic Advisers 2020).  

In order to continue to add to the formidable intellectual capital stock of Chicago economics, Tomas J. Philipson and Casey B. Mulligan have developed a new initiative supporting economic research on healthcare markets and medical innovation. The initiative takes the unique approach of addressing issues specific to health care through a broader economic lens, applying insights from industrial organization, macroeconomics, finance, labor economics, and other fields. Some of the key focus areas investigated so far are FDA hedges, financial health engineering to support medical research, the effects of reference pricing on market entry, and innovation incentives and disincentives in NIH funding. In April of 2020, Mulligan published a report on the excess burden of COVID-19 and the value of medical innovation that assesses the total cost of COVID-19 in the U.S. (Mulligan 2020). Later, Mulligan and Philipson estimated that Project WARP Speed was worth $1.8 trillion due to getting COVID-19 vaccines at least six months before anybody expected. The initiative is currently planning a conference in the Spring of 2021 around the many issues of technological change in healthcare, including the measurements and determinants of these innovations.

Although COVID-19 would not arrive in the U.S. for two more years, Trump’s CEA was also being asked by the National Security Council’s biodefense team to look at the economics of vaccine innovation during pandemics.  This was an opportune time to bring the Chicago tradition on regulation together with its results on epidemiology and the value of medical innovation.  In a report published in September 2019, CEA concluded that “…improving the speed of vaccine production is more important for decreasing the number of infections than improving vaccine efficacy” and emphasized the need for large-scale manufacturing and the possible advantages of public-private partnerships” (Council of Economic Advisers 2019).  

 

Presidential Human Capital

The CEA vaccine report prompted a President’s Executive Order, also before the current pandemic, noting that “viruses emerge from animals … that can spread efficiently and have sustained transmission among humans.”  President Trump concluded that “vaccination is the most effective defense….”  As two of Trump’s former senior staff members put it “when COVID-19 emerged, the White House was ready and expeditiously applied the report's deregulatory and fiscal lessons to streamline FDA approval for vaccines and their parallel manufacturing on a large scale” (Grogan and Philipson 2020).

Mulligan and Philipson were in the Oval Office with the President and his economic team in February 2020 (when COVID-19 cases just were beginning to spread in the U.S., and before Operation Warp Speed).  His staff continued to worry that the FDA would not be interested in removing any more approval barriers.  But the President was confident, telling them that “I’ve done it before and will do it again … bring the FDA management in here.”  He and his administration not only knew why approval barriers needed to be removed but knew from prior experience how to do it.  By the end of that calendar year, two vaccines were approved, produced, and beginning to be delivered to the American population.

Bibliography

 

Becker, Gary, S., Tomas J. Philipson, and Rodrigo R. Soares. "The Quantity and Quality of Life and the   Evolution of World Inequality." American Economic Review, 95 (1): 277-291, 2005.


Council of Economic Advisers. The Administration’s FDA Reforms and Reduced Biopharmaceutical        Drug Prices. Executive Office of the President, October 2018.


---. Economic Report of the President. Executive Office of the President, February 2018.


---. Economic Report of the President. Executive Office of the President, March 2019.


---. Economic Report of the President. Executive Office of the President, February 2020.


---. Mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Influenza through Vaccine Innovation. Executive Office of the      President, September 2019.


Department of Health and Human Services. “Fraud and Abuse; Removal of Safe Harbor Protection for     Rebates Involving Prescription Pharmaceuticals and Creation of New Safe Harbor Protection for        Certain Point-of-Sale Reductions in Price on Prescription Pharmaceuticals and Certain Pharmacy Benefit Manager Service Fees.” Federal Register 84, no. 25 (February 6, 2019): 2340.


Friedman, Milton, and George J. Stigler. Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem. Irvington-on- the-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1946.


Gottlieb, Scott. "The FDA Is Evading the Law." Wall Street Journal. December 23, 2010.                                    https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704034804576025981869663212.


Grogan, Joseph, and Tomas J. Philipson. "How the White House Followed the Science to Enable a Quick Vaccine ." Newsweek. Last modified December 11, 2020. https://www.newsweek.com/how- white-house-followed-science-enable-quick-vaccine-opinion-1553617.


Jaffe, Sonia, Robert Minton, Casey B. Mulligan, and Kevin M. Murphy. Chicago Price Theory.    Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.


Klein, Daniel B. and Alexander Tabarrok.  Is the FDA Safe and Effective?  Independent Institute, 2001.


Mulligan, Casey B. 2020. "Economic Activity and the Value of Medical Innovation during a Pandemic." NBER Working Paper 27060, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.


---. "White House Attitudes toward "Screening Agencies" (looking at you FDA) " supply and demand (in that order). Last modified January 2, 2021. http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com/2021/01/white-          house-attitudes-toward-screening.html.


Mulligan, Casey B., and Tomas J. Philipson. "Operation Warp Speed: What a Deal!." Newsweek. Last      modified July 28, 2020. https://www.newsweek.com/operation-warp-speed-what-deal-opinion-    1520816.


Murphy, Kevin, and Robert Topel. "The Value of Health and Longevity." Journal of Political      Economy 114, no. 5 (October 2006).


Murphy, Kevin, and Robert Topel.  Measuring the Gains from Medical Research.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.


Peltzman, Sam.  “An Evaluation of Consumer Protection Legislation: The 1962 Drug Amendments.”  Journal of Political Economy.  81(5), October 1973: 1049-91.


Philipson, Tomas, J., and Eric Sun. 2008. "Is the Food and Drug Administration Safe and Effective?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22 (1): 85-102.


Philipson, Tomas J., Ernst R. Berndt, Adrian H. Gottschalk, and Eric Sun. "Cost Benefit Analysis of the   FDA: The Case of the Prescription Drug User Fee Acts." Journal of Economic Perspectives 22,      no. 1 (December 2008): 85-102.


Posner, Richard A. and Tomas J. Philipson. Private Choices and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic in an            Economic Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.


Stigler, George J. "The Theory of Economic Regulation." The Bell Journal of Economics and       Management Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3-21. Accessed February 17, 2021. doi:10.2307/3003160.


Temin, Peter.  Taking your medicine: drug regulation in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard        University Press, 1980.


U.S. President. Executive Order. “Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States to Promote           National Security and Public Health, Executive order 13887 of September 19, 2019.” Federal Register 84 no. 185 (September 24, 2019): 49935.

 

 

Footnotes


[1] See the 2001 survey by Klein and Tabarrok.