Brown Bag Seminar: "Spillovers of Price Regulations: evidence from the AMNOG Reform in Germany"

In years of growing pharmaceutical spending, the adoption of new health technologies faces several regulatory hurdles. Such policies are typically studied at the country level, even though there are explicit and implicit channels that link decisions made in different countries. This can be relevant in the EU, where external reference pricing is widely adopted. This work exploits the IMS pricing database of cancer drugs approved by the European Medicine Agency between 2007 and 2017, in order to assess the impact of the pharmaceutical regulation change that occurred in Germany in 2011 (the AMNOG bill) on foreign pharmaceutical prices. We show that the impact on foreign prices depends on whether the foreign country includes Germany in its reference set and, symmetrically, if it enters Germany’s reference set. In particular, our diff-in-diff approach shows that AMNOG led to a -11.7% price reduction of products launched in countries that refer to Germany (indirect spillover effect) and that products launched in countries referenced by Germany experienced a 5.06% price increase (strategic spillover effect).