Where fines are the only available sanction against cartels there is a trade-off between increased deterrence and the increased risk of insolvency. Higher fines are unacceptable to the European Commission because of the costs and uncertainties associated with bankruptcy. These concerns have led...

A recent phenomenon in competition policy is the acquisition of a private firm by an enterprise that is either wholly owned by government or in the midst of privatization. Such an acquisition poses the question of how public ownership may alter the incentives of a firm to engage in...

The paper identifies problems with the ordered breakup of Microsoft that seem to have been completely overlooked by the government, the judge, and the commentators. The breakup order prohibits Bill Gates and other large Microsoft shareholders from owning shares in both of the companies that...

China's new Anti-Monopoly Law (AML), over two decades in the making, was finally enacted on August 30, 2007 and on August 1, 2008 will replace the disparate and ineffective competition regime currently in place. Legislators invited the input of a wide array of domestic and foreign legal experts...

Advances in competition economics as well as in computational and empirical methods have offered the scope for the employment of merger simulation models in merger control procedures during the past almost 15 years. Merger simulation is, nevertheless, still a very young and innovative instrument...

This Chapter in the book Pioneers of Law and Economics discusses the remarkable career of Henry Manne. Writing when there was a theory vacuum in legal academia, Manne breathed life into corporate law by using economic principles to formulate a sweeping new theory of the corporation. Then he took...

The paper studies the market reaction to the withdrawal of a prominent private bank - Kuhn Loeb - from the board of several firms. The event study shows that although Kuhn Loeb added significant value to the firms where it had a board seat, most of this value came from reduced industry...

In this paper, we develop a new screen to detect manipulation in commodities markets. If manipulation is occurring, not all of the relevant information is being filtered through the market, which means that the market is being quot;fooledquot; and its ability to forecast future prices is...

This paper focuses on the application and interpretation of measures of rate of return for competition law. Amongst other results we analyse how outsourcing and similar arrangements impact on the rate of profitability and show that the measurement is more volatile the greater the rate of profit,...

This paper presents empirical evidence about the ability of event studies to capture future mergers' profitability measured by accounting data. We use a sample of large horizontal concentrations during the period 1990-2002 involving 459 firms either as merging firms or competitors, and contrast...