Find and Replace: R&D Investment Following the Erosion of Existing Products

Joshua L. Krieger (), Xuelin Li () and Richard T. Thakor ()
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Joshua L. Krieger: Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts 02163
Xuelin Li: Department of Finance, Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208
Richard T. Thakor: Finance department, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455; MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142

Management Science, 2022, vol. 68, issue 9, 6552-6571

Abstract: How do innovative firms react when existing products experience negative shocks? We explore this question with detailed project-level data from drug development firms. Using the Food and Drug Administration public health advisories as idiosyncratic negative shocks to approved drugs, we examine how drug makers react through investment decisions. Following these shocks, affected firms increase research and development (R&D) expenditures, driven by a higher likelihood of acquiring external innovations rather than developing novel projects internally. Such acquisition activities are concentrated in firms with weak research pipelines. We also find that competing developers move resources away from the affected therapeutic areas. Our results show how investments in specialized commercialization capital create path dependencies and alter the direction of R&D investments.

Keywords: R&D investments; drug development; product shocks; M&A; biopharmaceutical industry; FDA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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