Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if regulators can use new policy to innovate around this tradeoff. We find that the BTD program shortened clinical development times by 23 percent and did not impact the ex post safety profile of drugs with the designation. The BTD program had the greatest impact on less experienced firms and reduced clinical trial design complexity. The results suggest that targeted regulatory innovation can shorten R&D periods without compromising product quality.

We examine editors' influence on the scientific content of academic journals by unpacking the role of three major forces: journals' stated missions, the aggregate supply of and demand for specific topics, and scientific homophily via editorial gatekeeping. In a sample of top biomedical journals, we find the first two forces explain the vast majority of variation in published content. The upper bound of the homophily effect is statistically significant but practically much less important. Marginal changes to the composition of editorial boards do not meaningfully impact journals' content in the short run. However, we cannot rule out persistent or pervasive frictions in the publication process.