Darius Lakdawalla

Darius Lakdawalla is a leading authority on health economics and health policy. Professor Lakdawalla has extensive expertise in pharmaceutical industry policy, medical innovation, prescription drug pricing and drug competition, as well as health insurance coverage and drug reimbursement by private payors and Medicare Part D. In connection with his research, Professor Lakdawalla has testified before Congress a number of times on topics related to innovation, patient access, and government reimbursement of prescription drugs including most recently in connection with the Inflation Reduction Act’s anticipated economic impacts on the pharmaceutical industry.

Professor Lakdawalla has been retained as an expert witness in multiple life sciences and healthcare matters, in which he evaluated both liability and damages issues. He has provided economic testimony related to allegations of product liability, breach of contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, product hopping, and generic drug price fixing. He also served as an expert for the merging parties in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) challenge of Amgen’s acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics, addressing the FTC’s allegation that the acquisition would allow Amgen to entrench Horizon’s dominant position through the use of bundled rebates. Professor Lakdawalla has testified both in deposition and at trial.

Professor Lakdawalla also has extensive experience providing business consulting services to major pharmaceutical companies, as well as analyzing drug clinical trial data.

An award-winning researcher, Professor Lakdawalla has published articles in leading economics, medical, and health policy journals, including the American Economic Review, Health Affairs, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. His article “Economics of the Pharmaceutical Industry” was published in the Journal of Economic Literature. He has also coauthored chapters in the Handbook of Health Economics, The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of the Biopharmaceutical Industry, and The Elgar Companion to Health Economics (2nd edition), among others.

Professor Lakdawalla currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Health Economics. He was previously an associate editor for the American Journal of Health Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He has also served as an expert panelist for the National Academy of Medicine. Professor Lakdawalla is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

For more than a decade, Professor Lakdawalla has taught courses on health economics and policy, risk analysis, and health management. Before joining USC, he served as senior economist and director of research at the RAND Corporation’s Bing Center for Health Economics.