I’m a Health Policy & Management PhD candidate at Harvard Business School interested in competition and innovation, with a particular topic focus on the pharmaceutical industry and prescription drug policy.

I will be on the academic job market in Fall 2025.

Email: ozhao @ hbs.edu

Job Market Paper: Policy Incentives and Pharmaceutical Innovation (Latest draft)

Abstract: Pharmaceutical firms’ incentives to develop new drugs stem from expected profitability. We explore how policies that shape these expectations influence pharmaceutical innovation. First, we estimate the effects of extending market exclusivity for antibiotics, a drug class where private returns to development historically had not internalized the high social value of new innovation. Using a difference-in-differences approach leveraging implementation of legislation that approximately doubled the market exclusivity period for certain antibiotics, we find that the policy increased innovative activity at multiple stages of drug development, from patenting to preclinical activity to phase 3 clinical trials. Building on these empirical findings, we calibrate a structural model of firms’ drug development decisions to generalize our findings beyond antibiotics. We simulate counterfactual policies (exclusivity extensions and price controls), highlighting how differences in average market size and revenue timing shape policy effectiveness across therapeutic areas.