The duration of merger proceedings held by competition authorities is an important determinant of the efficiency of the … entire merger control process. We use a dataset of 2953 Phase I and 92 Phase II investigations completed by the European … also provide evidence that the significant increase in average duration identified after the 2004 merger regulation reform …

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained … in EU merger cases and give an overview of the legal discussion in the EU and US. …

the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and … decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four maintained assumptions, merger control might be interpreted to be effective if … rents accruing due to the increased market power observed around the merger announcement are reversed by the antitrust …

that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the … concerns about the Commission’s merger enforcement being too lax. …