Professor Marc-Andre Gagnon investigates how the innovation system in the pharmaceutical sector is broken. In the last 15 years, fewer new drugs have arrived on the market, and the vast majority of them do not represent any therapeutic advancement as compared to what already exist. However, promotional expenditures surged during that period and, according to dominant pharmaceutical companies' annual reports, they are gaining record profits in spite of the lack of therapeutic innovation.... Read more about The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Corruption: How to Reconcile Profits and Public Health in the Pharaceutical Sector?

Dr. Susannah Rose's primary project at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics has been to develop an empirical research study aimed at assessing the nature of institutional financial conflicts of interest among patient advocacy groups in the United States. During her first year as a residential Lab Fellow at the Safra Center, Susannah finished a paper that reviews the literature on patient advocacy groups, which describes their significant role in shaping health policy in the U.S. and provides recommendations for helping advocacy groups better manage institutional conflicts of interest. In this paper, she argues that maintaining and enhancing trust and institutional trustworthiness are important targets for policies aimed at managing financial conflicts of interest.... Read more about Patient Advocacy Organizations

Recently, policymakers in the US have become concerned about the relationships between medical trainees and pharmaceutical industry representatives, because such interactions may affect trainees' professional development and their future prescribing practices. Lab fellow Kirsten Austad's project involves investigating the extent of trainees' contacts with pharmaceutical industry representatives, as well as the impact of these interactions on trainees' attitudes about pharmaceutical policy issues and knowledge about evidence-based prescribing.... Read more about Medical Trainees and the Pharmaceutical Industry: a National Survey

Observers raised concerns over the effectiveness and the independence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission long before the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan this past spring. President Obama, for one, said the agency has "become captive of the industries that it regulates" while on the campaign trail in 2007. But the Japanese nuclear disaster has focused a new spotlight on the commission and its ability to effectively oversee nuclear safety.... Read more about Regulatory Capture and the NRC

Professionals are often influenced by conflicts of interest when they have a personal, often material, interest in giving biased advice. Although disclosure (informing advisees about the conflict of interest) is often proposed as a solution to problems caused by such conflicts, prior research has found both positive and negative effects of disclosure.

The principal investigator of this project is Sunita Sah. Sunita's interest in disclosure or sunshine policies is to understand when they work and when they do not.... Read more about Conflicts of Interest and the Potential and Pitfalls of Disclosure

Academic researchers operate within a unique economy where the goal is to seek and teach the truth about our universe, not to generate profit; indeed, ideas (not money) are the currency of exchange. As such, corruption in this context can be thought of as anything that prevents researchers from discovering the truth or anything that takes away from the public's opinion of the veracity of research findings. Alek Chakroff and Brandi Newell are collaborating to investigate the subtle and often unintentional cognitive biases that can lead researchers away from the truth and, more specifically, towards confirming their own ideas or "pet theories."... Read more about Obstruction to Truth: Institutional Corruption in Academia

Abigail Brown's primary project at the Lab is to write a book, using archival firm evidence and other historical methods, to trace the development of the financial statement auditing profession into an entity that could fairly be describes as one suffering from institutional corruption. Parallel to the main book project, she is writing a series of economic articles that develop rigorously the theory that provides the foundation for the book's analysis of qualitative data.... Read more about Auditors