Department of Economics

Journal of Health Economics 108 p. 103157-103157 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2026.103157

Pharmaceutical expenditures are rising rapidly, driven in part by the innovation of highly effective but very expensive drug therapies that treat multiple diseases, implying that payers face a critical trade-off between cost containment and access to new medicines. A key policy question is whether producers should be restricted to uniform pricing or allowed to use indication-based pricing, where prices vary across patient groups. We use a two-market model to analyse how this choice affects drug producers’ incentives to invest in new indications, their pricing strategies, and the resulting surplus for health plans. In a monopoly setting, indication-based pricing yields higher profits and thus strengthens incentives to invest in new indications, while the payer prefers uniform pricing unless the fixed investment costs cannot be recouped. However, monopoly-based insights may not hold if the multi-indication producer faces therapeutic competition in one of the markets. Specifically, we identify a softening-of-competition effect, where a uniform pricing restriction serves as a credible commitment to raise prices in the competitive market. In this case, the health plan might favour indication-based pricing to reduce costs. Overall, our findings suggest that neither pricing scheme is universally optimal, underscoring the need for case-by-case assessments across drug classes.

Differential geometry and its applications 104 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.difgeo.2026.102404

We consider the Lie group of smooth diffeomorphisms Diff(M) of a simple polytope M in the euclidean space. Simple polytopes are special cases of manifolds with corners. We find a canonical Lie group structure for the quotient of the diffeomorphism group by the subgroup of diffeomorphisms that equal the identity on the boundary, turning the canonical quotient homomorphism into a smooth submersion. We also show that the identity component of the diffeomorphism group is generated by the exponential image, by proving general controllability results.

Journal of Statistical Software 116(3) Doi: https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v116.i03

Nature Human Behaviour Doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02482-9

Public Choice p. 1-19 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-026-01399-1

When are politicians incentivized to vote? To answer this question, we examine politicians’ electoral participation before, during and after their political career. Our dataset combines individual-level register data for all candidates in the 2015, 2019, and 2023 Norwegian local elections with population-wide turnout data. We show that politicians are significantly more likely to vote when they are running for office (relative to pre- and post-office electoral participation), particularly if placed in top-ranked list positions and running for parties with council representation. Candidates in ‘contested’ list positions appear to exhibit higher turnout than those in ‘hopeless’ positions, but this gap disappears when controlling for individual fixed effects. Finally, post-office electoral participation exceeds pre-office participation after accounting for individual fixed effects, suggesting some degree of persistence and habit-formation. Overall, these findings contribute to a better understanding of how candidates’ personal ambitions and electoral incentives interact with institutional features to influence electoral behavior.