Antiturst enforcement agencies and courts use net effect on price as a touchstone for the legality of mergers. This paper derives a simple, and completely general, condition for implementing that standard when industry equilibrium is static Nash in qualities (Cournot).

In the U.S., unlike much of the rest of the world, the mixing of banking and commerce is largely prohibited. One exception is industrial loan companies (ILCs), state chartered depository institutions some of which are owned by commercial parents. In 2006, the FDIC put a moratorium on the...

Recent rate increases by U.S. freight railroads have refocused attention on regulation, deregulation, and regulatory reforms in the railroad industry. Legislation introduced into Congress would render a variety of railroad behavior newly subject to the jurisdiction of the antitrust statutes,...

During a recent study of how 1991 federal sentencing guidelines have affected the penalities that federal courts impose on public coporations, we performed an independent evaluation of the quality of the data on corporate sanctions released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to the public (as...

The first generation of competition laws in Central Eastern Europe-enacted in 1990 and 1991 in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia-have undergone significant amendements following their earliest enforcement period.This paper uses an analytical framework previously used to examine those...

A variety of proposals for creating more competition within the railroad sector are under consideration in countries throughout the world. Brazil, though something of latecomer to wider infrastructure reform, has recently taken large steps in restructuring its railroad system. This paper...

The critical loss test proposed by Barry Harris and Joseph Simons has become popular in helping define U.S. antitrust markets. The test commonly leads to large, inclusive markets. We show that it is problematic, for several reasons.

In antitrust enforcement as in cost-benefit analysis, neoclassical economics may be interpreted as arguing for the use of a “total welfare” standard whose implementation treats transfers as welfare-neutral. Several recent papers call for antitrust agencies to move in the direction of this...

In this article we distinguish between two types of single-firm conduct. The first, which we call "extraction," is conduct engaged in by the firm to capture surplus from what the firm has itself created independent of the conduct’s effect on rivals. The second, which we call “extension," is...

Economists sometimes decry the persistence with which firms set prices above marginal cost and thus, according to the economists, fail to maximize profits. But it is the economists who have it wrong – first, because variable accounting costs are not always a good proxy for marginal economic...