Speaker biographies

Christopher Adams is a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where
he works on mergers and antitrust cases in a number of industries, including
pharmaceuticals, real estate, software, and retail. Before joining the FTC, Mr. Adams was
a visiting assistant professor at the University of Vermont in 2001. He was one of the
local organizers for the 2008 International Industrial Organization Conference, and he is
currently organizing the First Annual FTC Microeconomics Conference in November
2008. His publications include articles in Health Affairs, the International Journal of
Industrial Organization, and Economics Letters. His current research interests include
estimating incentives for pharmaceutical R&D, empirical industrial organization,
estimating demand from online-auction data, information aggregation in predictions
markets, and decision-making in sports.

John E. Calfee is a resident scholar at AEI. He previously worked on the economics of
consumer protection—including advertising and marketing, the tort liability system,
tobacco, and other topics—at the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission.
He has taught marketing and consumer behavior at the business schools of the University
of Maryland at College Park and Boston University and spent a year as a visiting senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Calfee’s academic articles and opinion pieces
cover a variety of topics, including tort liability, advertising and information, Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, and the pharmaceutical market. His op-eds have
run in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, and
numerous other newspapers and magazines. His recent scholarly publications have
appeared in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Health Affairs, and the Supreme
Court Economic Review. He has published three short books: Fear of Persuasion: A New
Perspective on Advertising and Regulation (AEI Press, 1997); Prices, Markets, and the
Pharmaceutical Revolution (AEI Press, 2000); and Biotechnology and the Patent System:
Balancing Innovation and Property Rights, with Claude Barfield (AEI Press, 2007). He
has also testified before Congress and federal agencies on various topics, including
alcohol advertising; biodefense vaccine research; international drug prices; the Vioxx
episode; and, most recently, FDA oversight of drug safety.

Anupam B. Jena is a Bing Center visiting fellow at the RAND Corporation and is
completing his final year of medical school at the University of Chicago. Mr. Jena’s
research has focused on the economic value of medical innovation and the implications
of cost-effectiveness policies for technological growth. He is the recipient (with Tomas J.
Philipson) of the 2007 Garfield Award from Research America for the best paper on the
economic impact of medical technology.

Tomas J. Philipson is a visiting scholar at AEI and a professor in the Harris School, the
department of economics, and the Law School at the University of Chicago. He is
currently a health care adviser to the presidential campaign of John McCain and served in
the Bush administration as the senior economic adviser to the commissioner of the Food
and Drug Administration from 2003 to 2004 and subsequently as the senior economic
adviser to the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from 2004
to 2005. Mr. Philipson is an editor of Forum for Health Economics & Policy and is on the
editorial board of Health Economics. His honors and awards include the Kenneth Arrow
Award from the International Health Economics Association in 2000 and 2006, the
Garfield Award from Research America in 2007, the Prêmio Haralambos Simeonidis
from the Brazilian Economic Association in 2006, and the Distinguished Economic
Research Award from the Milken Institute in 2003. Mr. Philipson is the cofounder of
Precision Health Economics, LLC. He is affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, the
RAND Corporation, the Milken Institute, the Heartland Institute, and the Center for
Medicine in the Public Interest; is an adviser to the Gerson Lehrman Group; and is a
consultant for Lexecon and Analysis Group.

View Event Details.