摘要
The pharmaceutical industry is well known for its enormous marketing expenditures, particularly on direct-to-physician promotions known as detailing. Excessive competition is often cited as the primary driver of such spending, and policies that limit detailing activities have been justified on this premise. This paper examines what drives long-run detailing trajectories at the drug level across multiple therapeutic categories. Using a panel of 464 drugs launched since 1984, we find that detailing increases for 41 percent of drugs. We do not detect a change in aggregate drug-level detailing around competitor entry. Instead, long-run detailing growth tracks post-launch indication expansion: drugs gaining FDA approval for additional uses follow steeper detailing trajectories, with top-quartile expansion drugs exhibiting roughly 18 percent more cumulative growth than bottom-quartile drugs. Our drug-level evidence does not support the competition premise, and we suggest that policymakers distinguish drugs with post-launch indication expansion.