Three empirical essays on the deregulation of licensing in the pharmacy retail sector in Italy

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the effects of the deregulation of the pharmaceutical market in Italy on various aspects such as worker mobility and income, pharmacy revenue and net profit, as well as hospitalizations and access to service. The Monti government implemented this reform in 2012 to alter the way in which pharmacies operate in Italy. The primary objective is to increase openings and remove barriers to entry into this market. The opening of pharmacies in various Italian regions caused an exogenous shock, as certain regions started earlier than others, resulting in municipalities with new openings and others without. This presents us with a natural experiment that we can analyze using a difference-in-differences model. However, in our instance, we have a policy that is characterized by staggered adoption of the treatment, and thus we require more complex tools for the study. Fortunately, there are models recently developed by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) and Borusyak et al. (2022) that can accurately estimate the effects of a treatment over several periods.