While liberalization in energy markets has been a widely successful process all over the world, incumbents often still hold a dominant position. Thus, electricity wholesale markets are subject to market surveillance. Nevertheless, consolidated findings on abusive practices of market power and...

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of competition policy by estimating its impact on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over the period 1995-2005. We find a robust positive and significant effect of competition policy as measured by...

This paper explores the effects that collusion can have in newspaper markets where firms compete for advertising as well as for readership. We compare three modes of competition: i) competition in the advertising and the reader market, ii) semi-collusion over advertising (with competition in the...

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry - the videogame market - which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis...

This paper empirically evaluates the price effects of the merger of two major book retail chains in the UK: Waterstone's and Ottakar's. We employ differences-in-differences techniques and use a rich dataset containing monthly scanner data information on a sample of 200 books sold in 60 stores in...

We analyze horizontal mergers when the acquirer holds a passive partial ownership stake (PPO) in the target firm prior to the merger. We show that a PPO reduces the minimal synergy level necessary to make a merger beneficial for consumers. It follows that an antitrust authority ignoring existing...

This paper experimentally analyzes the cartel coordination challenge induced by the discrimination of cartel ringleaders in leniency policies. Ringleaders often take a leading role in the coordination and formation of a cartel. A leniency policy which grants amnesty to all whistleblowers except...

We analyze the efficiency defense in merger control. First, we show that the relationship between exogenous efficiency gains and social welfare can be non-monotone. Second, we consider both endogenous mergers and endogenous efficiencies and find that merger proposals are largely aligned with a...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...