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Returns on different types of investment in the global pharmaceutical industry

Using stock market data of 10,550 publicly listed companies between 1987 and 2012, we study the marginal returns on investment for a large sample of pharmaceutical firms and compare them with returns on investment of firms from other industries. We also disentangle effects of different types of investments on total returns, namely, investment in advertising, research and development (R&D), fixed capital, and acquisitions. Our results suggest that the return of pharmaceutical companies on total investments is higher compared with a large number of nonpharmaceutical companies for the U.S. subsample in the first half of the observation period whereas no such difference can be found for non‐U.S. firms. We also find that the return–cost ratio has declined during our observation period, with the biggest drop for European firms. R&D investments generate the highest, and advertising investments the lowest returns.