Firms operate under a wide range of rules and regulations. These include, for example, environmental regulations (in which some industries have increased regulatory exposure) and finance and accounting (where all industries have reporting requirements). In other areas, such as antitrust cartels,...

A growing number of policymakers and scholars are calling for tougher rules to curb corporate acquisitions. But these appeals are premature. There is currently little evidence to suggest that mergers systematically harm consumer welfare. More importantly, scholars fail to identify alternative...

Antitrust regulators around the world, including in the UK, have proposed changes to merger review policies that impact how acquisitions of start-ups would be investigated and evaluated. Such changes will likely lead to heightened scrutiny—and increased costs and longer reviews—for many...

Where do competition, antitrust and private equity intersect? Once antitrust’s favored child compared to strategic buyers, private equity seems to have fallen from competition enforcers’ grace. Interestingly, this is part of a broader trend: financial investors in general, from BlackRock to...

An intense academic debate has arisen recently concerning the crucial bedrock that underpins a corporate governance regime where widely-held public companies dominate. In the discourse, little has been said about the contribution of merger activity. The paper seeks to address this gap by...

A great merger wave occurring in the United States between 1897 and 1903 was the single most important event in a process that yielded the pattern of managerial control and dispersed share ownership which currently distinguishes America's corporate economy from arrangements in most other...

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...

The Big Tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, have individually and collectively engaged in an unprecedented number of acquisitions. When a dominant firm purchases a start-up that could be a future entrant and thereby increase competitive rivalry, it raises a...

Should there be limits on startup acquisitions by dominant firms? Efficiency requires that startups sell their technology to the right incumbents, that they develop the right technology, and that they invest the right amount in R&D. In a model of differentiated oligopoly, we show distortions...

Merging firms regularly argue that mergers involving capacity-constrained firms are unlikely to be anti-competitive, because the incentive for the merged firm to raise prices and reduce quantity may not be strong enough to generate slack in the capacity constraints and lead to higher prices. We...