The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences...

Bei Verstößen gegen geltendes Wettbewerbsrecht entstehen typischerweise Schäden durch überhöhte Preise und entgangenen Gewinn bei nachgelagerten Wirtschaftsstufen. Hierfür besteht ein gesetzlicher Schadensersatzanspruch. Auf europäischer Ebene wird derzeit ein Rechtsrahmen diskutiert, mit...

The paper develops a framework to enforce anti-predation rules that explicitly takes the intervention stage into account. In particular, it is proposed to improve predation enforcement by focusing on two channels: refining the current regime, and amending it. With respect to the refinement of...

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages – characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation – the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

We investigate the relationship between public and private enforcers introducing a more differentiated approach. In contrast to the existing literature, we take into account that the costs and benefits of detection and prosecution and, thus, the usefulness of each enforcement mode may change...

We provide an empirical assessment of EC cartel enforcement decisions between 2000 and 2011. Following an initial characterisation of our dataset, we especially investigate the determinants of the duration of cartel investigations. We are able to identify several key drivers of investigation...

Public and private action against cartels is an internationally recognized cornerstone of antitrust enforcement. Effective private enforcement requires that cartel victims can receive (at least) full compensation for the harm suffered. Academics and competition authorities support this goal with...

Damage compensation claims in case of cartels are supposed to increase deterrence, compensate losses and increase efficiency. I show that such claims can instead have adverse effects: If suppliers or buyers of cartelists are compensated in proportion to the profits lost due to the cartel,...