The Value of a Vaccine

The stock market this morning offers a useful event study on how much of the social value of a vaccine the producer of the vaccine may expect to be able to capture. The good news from Moderna’s early-stage coronavirus vaccine trials lifted the Dow about 3 percent and Moderna itself around 30 percent, according to the Washington Post. We can’t be sure, of course, that these increases were solely because of this news, but let’s assume that this is a good first approximation. The market cap of the Dow increased by around $216 billion, while the market cap of Moderna increased