Kyle Myers is an assistant professor of business administration in the Technology and Operations Management unit. He teaches the first-year Technology and Operations Management course.
Professor Myers studies the economics of innovation. His research lies at the intersections of science, health care, and the commercialization process. More specifically, Professor Myers is interested in the strategic choices and performance of scientists, the supply and demand of innovation in high-tech sectors, public versus private funding of R&D, and the management of innovation in large organizations such as hospitals and pharmaceutical and engineering firms. His work has received funding from the Kauffman Foundation and was awarded the NBER-IFS Predoctoral Scholarship in the Value of Medical Research.
Professor Myers holds a Ph.D. from the Wharton School’s Department of Health Care Management and Economics. He has a M.S. in Health Policy and Management and a B.S. in Biology from Penn State University. Prior to joining HBS, he served as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We examine trends in the productivity of the pharmaceutical sector over the past three decades. Motivated by Ricardo’s insight regarding demand-driven productivity in settings of scarce resources, we examine the industry’s aggregate R&D production function. Using exogenous demand shocks to instrument investments, we find that demand growth can explain a large portion of R&D growth, and the industry’s returns to scale have been stable whereas total factor productivity has declined significantly. Predictions based on these results are in line with Ricardo’s conclusion that productivity and rents are endogenous to demand.
This paper estimates the degree to which scientists are willing to change the direction of their work in exchange for resources. Novel data from the National Institutes of Health is used to estimate an entry model that accounts for strategic interactions. Inducing a scientist to change their direction by 1 standard deviation, a qualitatively small difference, requires a four-fold increase in funds, an extra $1 million per year. But at current levels, the costs and benefits of directed versus undirected research appear to be quite similar.
In markets where consumers seek expert advice regarding purchases, firms seek to influence experts, raising concerns about biased advice. Assessing firm-expert interactions requires identifying their causal impact on demand, amidst frictions like market power. We study pharmaceutical firms’ payments to physicians, leveraging instrumental variables based on regional spillovers from hospitals’ conflict-of-interest policies and market shocks due to patent expiration. We find that the average payment increases prescribing of the focal drug by 73 percent. Our structural model estimates indicate that payments decrease total surplus, unless payments are sufficiently correlated with information (vs. persuasion) or clinical gains not captured in demand.
