The More We Die, The More We Sell? A Simple Test of the Home-Market Effect
利用全球药品销售数据，以各国人口结构预测疾病死亡率和药品需求，检验了国内需求大的产品出口也多的国内市场效应，发现国家倾向于净出口其需求最大的药品。
The home-market effect, first hypothesized by Linder (1961) and later formalized by Krugman (1980), is the idea that countries with larger demand for some products at home tend to have larger sales of the same products abroad. In this article, we develop a simple test of the home-market effect using detailed drug sales data from the global pharmaceutical industry. The core of our empirical strategy is the observation that a country's exogenous demographic composition can be used as a predictor of the diseases that its inhabitants are most likely to die from and, in turn, the drugs they are most likely to demand. We find that the correlation between predicted home demand and sales abroad is positive and greater than the correlation between predicted home demand and purchases from abroad. In short, countries tend to be net sellers of the drugs they demand the most, as predicted by Linder (1961) and Krugman (1980).