This survey examines recent developments in economic research relating to antitrust, paying specific attention to research in the areas of collusion and merger enforcement. Research relating to both collusion and mergers has made significant advances in the last twenty years. With respect to...

In The Antitrust Paradox, Robert Bork viewed most mergers as either competitively neutral or efficiency enhancing. In his view, only mergers creating a dominant firm or monopoly were likely to harm consumers. Bork was especially skeptical of oligopoly concerns resulting from mergers. In this...

Economic analysis of competition regulation is most developed in the domain of horizontal mergers, and modern agency guidelines reflect a substantial consensus on the appropriate template for merger assessment. Nevertheless, official protocols are understood to rest on a problematic market...

The federal government stands poised to exercise its constitutional right to regulate financial markets, an area traditionally left to competing provincial securities commissions. The current state of securities regulation renders impotent US-style takeover defences, such as poison pills and...

The challenge of effective merger enforcement is tremendous. U.S. antitrust agencies must, by statute, quickly forecast the competitive effects of mergers that occur in virtually every sector of the economy to determine if mergers can proceed. Surprisingly, given the complexity of the regulators...

In this article, I explain the inadequacy of our current state of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of antitrust policy towards mergers. I then discuss the types of data that one must collect in order to be able to perform an analysis of the effectiveness of antitrust policy. There are two...

We analyze the optimal dynamic policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and occur over time. Approving a currently proposed merger will affect the profitability and welfare effects of potential future mergers, the characteristics of which...

In this paper we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. horizontal merger policy and apply it to the study of five recent consumer product mergers. We selected the mergers from those that, from the public record, seemed to be most problematic for the antitrust agencies. Thus we...

Merger policy is the most active area of U.S. antitrust policy. It is now widely believed that merger policy must move beyond its traditional focus on static efficiency to account for innovation and address dynamic efficiency. Innovation can fundamentally affect merger analysis in two ways....

Merger control authorities may approve a merger based on a so-called 'efficiency defence'. An important aspect in clearing mergers is that the efficiencies need to be merger-specific. Joint ventures, and in particular research joint ventures (RJVs), may achieve comparable efficiencies possibly...