Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

We propose a method for bounding the demand elasticity in growing, homogeneous-product markets that requires only minimal data--market price and quantity over a time span as short as two periods. Reminiscent of revealed-preference arguments using choices over time to bound the shape of...

This paper deals with the effect of trade restrictions on competition in oligopolistic markets. Quantitative restrictions, such as VER's (Voluntary Export Restrictions) are shown to affect the extent to which foreign firms can compete in the domestic market, and hence to raise the equilibrium...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

We analyze tacit collusion in an industry characterized by cyclical demand and long-run scale decisions; firms face deterministic demand cycles and choose capacity levels prior to competing in prices. Our focus is on the nature of prices. We find that two types of price wars may exist. In one,...

In 1991, the Antitrust Division sued MIT and the eight schools in the Ivy League under Section 1 of the Sherman Act for engaging in a conspiracy to fix the prices that students pay. The Antitrust Division claimed that the schools conspired on financial aid policies in an effort to reduce aid and...

When will a monopolist have incentives to foreclose a complementary market by degrading compatibility/interoperability of his products with those of rivals? We develop a framework where leveraging extracts more rents from the monopoly market by "restoring" second degree price discrimination. In...

This paper considers the recent literature on firm markups in light of both new and classic work in the field of Industrial Organization. We detail the shortcomings of papers that rely on discredited approaches from the "structure-conduct-performance" literature. In contrast, papers based on...

While economic theories indicate that market power by downstream firms can potentially counteract market power upstream, antitrust policy is opaque about whether to incorporate countervailing market power in merger analyses. We use detailed national claims data from the healthcare sector to...

We examine the capital-market effects of changes in securities regulation in the European Union (EU) aimed at reducing market abuse and increasing transparency. To estimate causal effects for the population of EU firms, we exploit that for plausibly exogenous reasons, like national legislative...