Essays on the Socioeconomic Determinants of Health and Pharmaceutical Regulation

This PhD thesis focuses on the socioeconomic determinants of health outcomes and drug consumption, the evaluation of policy levers aimed at limiting inappropriate pharmaceuticals’ use, as well as the role played by pharmaceutical advertising in the healthcare sector. The thesis is broadly divided into two parts. The first part investigates how socioeconomic disparities are empirically related to the spread of an infectious disease, the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 1), as well as consumption of potentially addictive medicines, as given by opioid pain-relievers (Chapter 2). The second part analyses the impact of laws restricting access to narcotic medications. The focus here is on Codeine-containing products, classified as mild opioids. I show how the impact of this type of policies varies depending on the socioeconomic environment in which they are applied in Chapter 3. Chapter 4, instead, studies how pharmaceutical companies reallocate their advertising expenses across geographical areas following the implementation of such policies and how this, in turn, affects sales. This research is primarily empirical and policy-oriented, even though one of my projects includes a theoretical component. The empirical analyses rely on the use of French data collected from several sources.