Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for...

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

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 adapted over time, both in terms of legislation and...

We study the evolution of the EC's merger decision procedure over the first 25 years of European competition policy. Using a novel dataset constructed at the level of the relevant markets and containing all merger cases over the 1990-2014 period, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to...

We empirically investigate the relevance of multi-homing in two-sided markets. First, we build a micro-founded structural econometric model that encompasses demand for differentiated products and allows for multi-homing on both sides of the market. We then use an original dataset on the Italian...

Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of...

We study the impact of different regulatory designs on the cost efficiency of operators providing a public service, exploiting data from the French transport industry. The distinctive feature of the study is that it considers regulatory regimes as endogenously determined choices, explained by...

Many industries are seeing an increase in concentration, leading to a discussion on the effectiveness of horizontal merger enforcement. The policy debate shows that one of the key arguments put forward when supporting potential mergers is the possibility of realization of merger efficiency...

I study the predictability of the EC's merger decision procedure before and after the 2004 merger policy reform based on a dataset covering all affected markets of mergers with an official decision documented by DG Comp between 1990 and 2014. Using the highly flexible, non-parametric random...

We quantify externalities on profitability and market shares of competing firms in oligopolistic markets through the transition from an n to an n - 1 player oligopoly after a merger. Competitors are identified via the European Commission's market investigations and our methodology allows us to...