This thesis seeks to investigate the vastly varying time to market of newly approved drugs across Europe. Firtsly, I use a country fixed effects model on data of newly approved drugs from 2014 to 2017 from 18 European countries. I investigate the correlations between medication specific characteristics and the launch time and find that drugs intended to treat HIV, rheumatism or hepatitis are correlated with a faster launch time. Orphan drugs, though they represent a third of the dataset are found to be insignificantly correlated with time to market. Using a drug fixed effects model, I research important country characteristics in relation to the launch time and find that countries with higher imports of medications are correlated with a quicker time to market. Countries with larger medication export sectors experience a longer waiting time, which could be linked to companies trying to hinder the parallel export of new drugs.

No / This paper utilises computerised textual analysis to explore the extent to which both firm and country characteristics influence mandatory and voluntary risk reporting (MRR and VRR) variations both within and between non-financial firms across Germany, the UK and the US, over the period from 2005 to 2010. We find significant variations in MRR and VRR between firms across the three countries. Further, we find, on average, that German firms tend to disclose significantly higher (lower) levels of risk information mandatorily than UK (US) firms. German firms, on average, tend to reveal considerably higher (lower) levels of VRR than US (UK) firms. Our results document that MRR and VRR variations are significantly influenced by systematic risk, the legal system and cultural values. We also find that country and firm characteristics have higher explanatory power over the observed variations in MRR than over those in VRR.