Drug prices have become a hot-button issue in the United States, with politicians across the spectrum agreeing that American consumers pay too much for prescription medications. But bringing down drug prices raises fundamental economic challenges that affect innovation, access, and healthcare costs worldwide.

In a paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, author Margaret K. Kyle examines how different countries approach pharmaceutical pricing regulation and the lessons to be learned from international experience. Her work reveals that while the United States does pay significantly higher prices for drugs, the story is more nuanced than a simple comparison suggests.

Kyle recently spoke with Tyler Smith about why economists generally support market solutions but make an exception for pharmaceuticals, how "pay-for-performance" contracts and subscription pricing models could bring down costs, and why simple solutions like copying other countries' prices might backfire.

Civil conflict has plagued much of Africa, with ethnically diverse countries experiencing particularly high rates of violence. Yet within these nations, patterns vary, leading to questions of why some groups rebel while others do not and why a given group rebels at certain times but not at other times.

In a paper in the American Economic Review, author Eleonora Guarnieri untangles the factors that drive groups to rebel against their central government. She shows that when ethnicities become more culturally distant from those in power, their likelihood of engaging in civil conflict increases significantly.

Her research suggests that conflicts arise as a result of ethnic favoritism in resource distribution and from fundamental disagreements over the types of public goods that central governments should provide.

Guarnieri recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how she estimated the impact of cultural distance on civil conflict, and what her findings may mean for reducing violence across Africa's diverse societies.

The Clean Air Act has been an essential tool for reducing air pollution in the United States. But standard estimation methods may overstate its impact, according to a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

Authors Lutz Sager and Gregor Singer reexamined the 2005 regulations targeting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and found that improvements in air quality were closer to a 3 percent reduction in pollutants rather than the 10 percent suggested by conventional methods. However, they also found that the benefits from cleaner air may be larger than previous estimates suggested.

Sager and Singer recently spoke with Tyler Smith about methods for properly estimating regulatory impacts that feature time trends and the implications for other measures based on estimates of air quality improvements.