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Drug Discovery and Development: Does the maturity of biotech companies affect their stock return volatility?

Brännström, Hanna LU (2018) NEKN01 20181
Department of Economics
Abstract
Stock return volatility is very high in the biotech industry opposed to other industries and there is limited explanation as to why. Biotech companies invest large amounts of money on research and development to move drugs forward in the clinical trial phases, to get market approval by the regulatory agency FDA. The drug discovery and development process is long and expensive, taking on average 12 years and costing around 2.5 billion USD per new approved drug. In addition, the investments made into moving drugs forward in the trial phases pose great uncertainty due to the unknown outcome and the low success rate of around 6% among the drug candidates. Still it has been suggested that when investing in biotech stocks one should look into... (More)
Stock return volatility is very high in the biotech industry opposed to other industries and there is limited explanation as to why. Biotech companies invest large amounts of money on research and development to move drugs forward in the clinical trial phases, to get market approval by the regulatory agency FDA. The drug discovery and development process is long and expensive, taking on average 12 years and costing around 2.5 billion USD per new approved drug. In addition, the investments made into moving drugs forward in the trial phases pose great uncertainty due to the unknown outcome and the low success rate of around 6% among the drug candidates. Still it has been suggested that when investing in biotech stocks one should look into the clinical trial data. This raises questions of how great an impact the clinical trials have on the stock return volatility. This study develops a new measure of maturity, from clinical trial data, and is the first study to investigate how the measure affects volatility. To do so, a panel data model with data from 128 biotech companies between 2009-2017 is used. Results show evidence that maturity is positively related to stock return volatility. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Brännström, Hanna LU
supervisor
organization
course
NEKN01 20181
year
type
H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
subject
keywords
Stock return volatility, biotech industry, clinical trials, R&D, panel data
language
English
id
8958741
date added to LUP
2018-09-26 10:44:40
date last changed
2018-09-26 10:44:40
@misc{8958741,
  abstract     = {{Stock return volatility is very high in the biotech industry opposed to other industries and there is limited explanation as to why. Biotech companies invest large amounts of money on research and development to move drugs forward in the clinical trial phases, to get market approval by the regulatory agency FDA. The drug discovery and development process is long and expensive, taking on average 12 years and costing around 2.5 billion USD per new approved drug. In addition, the investments made into moving drugs forward in the trial phases pose great uncertainty due to the unknown outcome and the low success rate of around 6% among the drug candidates. Still it has been suggested that when investing in biotech stocks one should look into the clinical trial data. This raises questions of how great an impact the clinical trials have on the stock return volatility. This study develops a new measure of maturity, from clinical trial data, and is the first study to investigate how the measure affects volatility. To do so, a panel data model with data from 128 biotech companies between 2009-2017 is used. Results show evidence that maturity is positively related to stock return volatility.}},
  author       = {{Brännström, Hanna}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Drug Discovery and Development: Does the maturity of biotech companies affect their stock return volatility?}},
  year         = {{2018}},
}