RAND Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation
The Value of Pharmaceutical Innovations for the Elderly: The Case of Antidepressants
Objectives:
This pilot will assess the value of the innovations in the antidepressant market for the elderly. The specific aims are:
- Estimate a discrete choice demand model for the antidepressant drug choice using individual-level data.
- Using the estimated demand parameters, compute social welfare from the introduction of new antidepressants.
Progress to Date
- Obtained the necessary raw data for the project, and made substantial progress in data cleaning and preparation of the data for estimation.
- Noticed that many people take more than one antidepressant simultaneously, so this needs to be handled in the choice model.
- Read several methodological papers that deal with this issue and started building the econometric framework for the project.
- Also conducted an expanded literature search and collected information specific to antidepressants.
Next Steps
Next step is to run the estimation and start conducting the welfare estimations. The results will be submitted for conference presentation and journal article. The investigator will also use the pilot work to submit a follow-up RO3 or RO1 grant proposal to NIH.
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