We study the evolution of EC merger decisions over the first 25 years of common European merger policy. Using a novel … dataset at the level of the relevant antitrust markets and containing all merger cases scrutinized by the Commission over the … definition and the complexity of the merger. Simple, linear probability models as usually applied in the literature overestimate …

This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first … theories of harm in major merger cases in the past few years. We then analyse the characteristics of almost 300 acquisitions … important merger cases, Facebook/Instagram and Google/Waze, providing a systematic assessment of the theories of harm considered …

that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the … concerns about the Commission’s merger enforcement being too lax. …

scrutinized by the European Commission between 1995 and 2014. We show that concentration, as measured by the market-specific post-merger … dimension analyzed. Strict past merger enforcement negatively correlates with concentration. Yet, this effect is stronger in the …

We analyze the impact of a merger on firms' incentives to innovate. We show that the merging parties always decrease … their innovation efforts post-merger while the outsiders to the merger respond by increasing their effort. A merger tends to … reduce overall innovation. Consumers are always worse off after a merger. Our model calls into question the applicability of …

We analyze evidence production in merger control as a delegation problem in an inquisitorial competition policy system …. The antitrust agency’s incentives to produce evidence on the efficiency of a merger proposal depend critically on its … implemented only after evidence on the efficiency of a merger proposal has been produced. …

We discuss the main Theories of Harm in EU merger control and their evolution since the 1990s. We present stylised … facts and trends using data extracted from EU merger decisions by natural language processing tools. EU merger policy has … evidence used. The introduction of the new Merger Regulation in 2004, which led to a change in the substantive test, also …