Proposal Description:

FDA regulation that came into force in 2017 requires the public disclosure of the results of clinical trials. Public discussion around this regulation has focused on the imperative for greater transparency in drug development, without consideration of potential strategic effects on pharmaceutical companies’ R&D decisions. For instance, companies may be more reluctant to start research projects if they expect the results will be disclosed to competitors. In this project we will use data on clinical trials to examine the effects of this regulation on the quantity and type of drug development projects carried out by pharmaceutical companies.

Requisite Skills and Qualifications:

The RA will help with compiling and cleaning clinical trials data and running statistical analyses. Tasks may include converting XML files to CSV data using Python, extracting relevant information from string data (e.g. drug names from treatment descriptions), merging datasets, and generating summary statistics, tables, and graphs.

The RA should have an interest in the project and experience with Stata or R. Experience with Python in a plus.