Issues in Empirical Merger Analysis

Antitrust policy and mergers provide a steady source of material for economic analysis, both theoretical and empirical. This is no surprise; in few other areas are the problems so obviously economic, so practical, and of such substantial policy significance. Seminal articles in economics such as Schmalensee (1978), Landes and Posner (1981), and Vernon and Graham (1971) are all the products of the application of microeconomics to mergers and antitrust policy. Antitrust also provides a rich environment for innovation in techniques and data, recently manifest in the development of merger simulations and the use of scanner price data. In this issue, we have eight papers applying various empirical methods to antitrust policy and mergers. The range of techniques is wide, covering merger simulation, financial event studies, traditional econometrics, and even the use of an innovative text searching tool for gathering data. While all of these contributions make useful conclusions, they also point to areas for further work. We thank all the authors for their careful research on interesting problems. We also thank a number of (anonymous) referees for their timely assistance in reviewing the articles contained in this issue