Using Remedies In Russian Merger Control

This article is motivated by a growing interest in the problem of merger control quality assessment. Remedies are one of the instruments of merger control and have a significant influence on the results of it. This paper aims to build and empirically evaluate a discrete choice model of merger remedies implementation in Russian merger control. The database consists of 443 merger cases accepted by the Russian antimonopoly agency between 2008 and 2011. We analyse the agency’s decisions to find which characteristics of merging firms and markets lead the Federal Antimonopoly Service to decide whether to allow conditional acceptance. We find that variables related to high market power lead more frequently to a remedy outcome. Such industries as the energy sector, communications and insurance positively affect the probability of a structural remedy. We do not find significant effects of “non-structural” variables, such as the world leader and the nationality of the firm-buyer