Abstract as per original application
(English/Chinese): |
The negative economic effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have increased and thus highlighted the challenges of world-wide pharmaceutical drug development. Since 2008, institutional investments in the pharmaceutical sector have declined, stagnating the growth of long-term R&D expenditures globally. Recent studies point to costly external financing for the paucity of breakthrough drugs but fall short in identifying potential investment channels through which financing can facilitate novel drug discovery. Our project serves to fill this gap by exploring the human capital channel and determining whether investments in skilled labor are critical in the success of drug development for pharmaceutical companies.
Long-term R&D is a risky endeavor as it often involves multiple stages of investments that not only span several years, but also have a high chance of failure. Corporate investments in long-term R&D typically necessitate the selective hiring and intensive training of high-skilled workers. Understanding how the employment of high-skilled workers affect the performance of long-term R&D informs policymakers of whether human capital investments are effective in creating breakthrough innovation. Drug development is a natural environment to study the performance of long-term R&D as the progress of each drug is observed through its clinical trial phase transitions, which in totality, may last over a decade before the drug reaches market. Unlike other studies which use firm investment aggregate data gathered from public financial statements, our study uses drug development data which allows us to look inside a "black box" of firm decision making at the product level.
We seek to determine whether human capital investments play a role in (1) novel drug discovery, which we measure based on drug chemical structure similarity to other drugs in a firm's development pipeline, and (2) reducing drug attrition rates within clinical trials. We conduct two natural experiments: one based on random lotteries that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services uses to allocate H-1B visas and the other based on a policy shock to the overall supply of skilled foreign labor through the H-1B program in our assessment process. We estimate the impact of shortages in high-skilled foreign labor (e.g., statisticians, biochemists, engineers, scientists, physicians, etc.) on drug development for U.S. pharmaceutical companies. Our goal is to establish empirically a human capital investment channel in long-term product development.
新冠疫情對經濟的負面影響不斷加深，因此也加深了全球醫藥研發的挑戰。自2008年來，醫藥領域的機構投資下降，全球醫藥長期研發費用的增長停滯不前。近期的研究指出，取得突破性藥物的融資成本高企，且發現支持新藥研發的潛在投資渠道短缺。本項目希望可以通過研究醫藥公司的人力資源渠道及決定投資專有技術人才是否對新藥成功研發起關鍵作用，以填補這一空缺。長期研發是有風險的，因為其包含了不同階段的投資，這些投資不但可能只維持若干年，且失敗率高。企業在研發的長期投資通常使得有選擇性的招聘及接受過高強度訓練的專有技術人才變得為之必要。理解聘用專有技術員工如何影響長期研發的效果，對於決策者決定是否投資於人力資源對取得創新研究的突破有意義。藥物研發是一個可了解長期研發成果的天然環境，因為每一項藥物的研發過程都是通過觀察臨床試驗階段，在藥物可以上市前整體上這個過程可能持續十年。與其他從公開財務報表收集的公司投資信息不同，我們的研究採用了藥物研發數據，使我們可以深入看到醫藥公司對產品等級的決策。我們希望可以知道是否在人力資源的投資可以在（1）新藥研發起作用，我們是基於醫藥公司研發管道中藥物的化學結構與其他藥物的相似性，（2）在臨床試驗階段藥物損耗減少起作用。我們做了兩項天然實驗：一個是基於美國公民及移民署H-1B簽證的抽籤數據，另一個是基於政策對H-1B簽證簽發總量的影響。我們預測缺乏海外專有技術人（例如統計學家，生物化學家，工程師，科學家，物理學家等）才對美國醫藥公司有影響。我們的目標是在長期產品研發過程中成立基於經驗的人力資源投資渠道。
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