In a pervasive but controversial practice, drug firms frequently make monetary or in-kind payments to physicians in the course of promoting prescription drugs. We use a federal database on the universe of such payments between 2013 and 2015 linked to prescribing behavior in Medicare Part D. We account for the targeting of payments with fixed effects for each physician-drug combination. In an event study, we show that physicians increase prescribing of drugs for which they receive payments in the months just after payment receipt, with no evidence of differential trends between paid and unpaid physicians prior to the payment. Next, we examine five case studies of major drugs going off patent. Physicians receiving payments from the firms experiencing the patent expiry transition their patients just as quickly to generics as physicians who do not receive such payments. In addition, using hand-collected efficacy data on three major therapeutic classes, we show that drug quality is largely unaffected by the receipt of payments.

在普遍但有争议的实践中，药品公司在推广处方药的过程中经常向医生付款，以现金或实物方式支付。我们使用联邦数据库，在2013年至2015年间将此类付款与Medicare D部分中的处方行为相关联。我们将针对每种医师-药物组合具有固定效果的付款目标考虑在内。在一项事件研究中，我们表明，在收款后的几个月内，医生会增加对他们收到付款的药物的处方，没有证据表明在付款之前付费和未付费医师之间存在差异趋势。接下来，我们研究了五个主要专利失效的案例研究。从专利到期的公司收取费用的医师将其患者与未收到此类费用的医师一样快地转换为仿制药。此外，使用三个主要治疗类别的人工收集的功效数据，我们显示药物质量在很大程度上不受付款收据的影响。