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Record W4401515421 · doi:10.1177/08404704241271237

Do high drug prices fund pharmaceutical innovation?

2024· article· en· W4401515421 on OpenAlexfundaboutno aff
William Lazonick, Öner Tulum

Bibliographic record

VenueHealthcare Management Forum · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicPharmaceutical Economics and Policy
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersInstitute for New Economic ThinkingCanadian Institute for Advanced Research
KeywordsBusinessStock (firearms)DividendShareholderCorporationCashMonetary economicsFinanceDrug pricesEconomicsCorporate governance

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Pharmaceutical companies claim that they need high drug prices to generate sufficient profits to invest in innovation. While this claim can be valid in principle, it is contradicted by the extent to which "Big Pharma" companies in the United States (US) distribute profits to shareholders in the form of cash dividends and stock buybacks. For 2013-2022, the 14 US-based pharmaceutical companies in the S&P 500 Index paid out 54% of net income as dividends and another 51% as buybacks. Incentivizing senior corporate executives to allocate resources in this financialized manner is, as we document, their stock-based compensation. In effect, these companies use high stock prices to boost stock yields at the expense of investing in innovation and compensating workers and taxpayers who make value-creating contributions to the corporation. Given the prominence of US-based pharmaceutical corporations in Canada, we explain how their financialization results in high Canadian drug prices and underinvestment in pharmaceutical research and development in Canada.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.033
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.085
Threshold uncertainty score0.169

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.033
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.004
Scholarly communication0.0070.004
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0030.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0190.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.103
GPT teacher head0.367
Teacher spread0.264 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2024
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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