Some Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Antimerger Relief in the United States

The paper seeks to fill the void in the empirical economics literature of U.S. antimerger policy. A new empirical measure of relief secured in a Section 7 case is proposed. The extent of obtained relief is modeled as a fraction of the competitive overlap subject to structural divestiture. The model of determination of the relative size and scope of divestiture is applied to a sample of recent Section 7 cases. The estimated model is reasonably successful at predicting the outcomes of several out-of-sample cases.