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Catherine Ishitani Wins 2025 ASHEcon Student Paper Award

LDI Associate Fellow’s Study Focused on Generic Pharmaceutical Quality Failures

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Penn LDI Associate Fellow and Wharton School PhD student Catherine Ishitani has won the 2025 American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) Student Paper Award. The award will be presented at the June ASHEcon annual conference in Nashville.

ASHEcon is a professional organization focused on promoting excellence in health economics research within the United States and serves as a forum for emerging ideas and evidence-based results that inform health and health care policies and practices.

Catherine Ishitani

A Health Care Management and Economics doctoral student, Ishitani’s research focuses on the industrial organization of health care, with a particular interest in pharmaceutical quality, resilience, and innovation.

Generic Drug Quality Failures

Entitled In Defense of the Middleman: Quality Failures in the Generic Pharmaceutical Market, her winning paper detailed evidence that generic pharmaceutical quality failures are pervasive, with more than 50% of manufacturers failing inspections during the analyzed 2000–2022 period. Additionally, it found that disclosure of these failures through recall announcements reduces wholesalers’ and retailers’ purchases of recalled drugs by 60%, with effects persisting for up to a decade—long after recalls are typically resolved.

The paper reports that these intermediaries are willing to pay a 2% premium for each 10% reduction in the probability of future recalls, which encourages manufacturers to compete on reliability rather than just price. This enhances the benefits of recall disclosures and ultimately increases the share of high-quality (not recalled) drugs by 27%.

The work was supported by an award from the annual Penn LDI 2024 Small Grants Program that funds early-stage investigations that would otherwise not qualify for larger NIH or other institutional grants.

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