IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18918.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Price Indexes for Clinical Trial Research: A Feasibility Study

Author

Listed:
  • Ernst R. Berndt
  • Iain M. Cockburn

Abstract

We estimate hedonic price indexes for clinical trial research, an important component of biomedical R&D, using a large sample of agreements between trial sponsors and clinical investigators obtained from Medidata Solutions Worldwide Inc. Nominal prices measured as total grant cost per patient rose by a factor of 4.5 between 1989 and 2011, while the NIH Biomedical R&D Price Index (BRDPI) focused on input costs rose only 2.2-fold. Most of the disparity appears to be attributable to changes in the nature and organization of clinical trials: during this period the average number of patients per site fell substantially while "site work effort" more than doubled. After controlling for these changes in the characteristics of investigator agreements using a variety of methods based on hedonic regressions, we find that the estimated rate of inflation in clinical trials costs tracks the BDRPI very closely. Results from this study suggest that it should be feasible for statistical agencies to develop a producer price index for this type of R&D activity, contributing to broader efforts to develop a deflator for contracted R&D services.

Suggested Citation

  • Ernst R. Berndt & Iain M. Cockburn, 2013. "Price Indexes for Clinical Trial Research: A Feasibility Study," NBER Working Papers 18918, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18918
    Note: PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18918.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dimitris Bertsimas & Nikita Korolko & Alexander M. Weinstein, 2019. "Covariate-Adaptive Optimization in Online Clinical Trials," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 67(4), pages 1150-1161, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • L65 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Chemicals; Rubber; Drugs; Biotechnology; Plastics
    • O49 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Other

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18918. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.