The introduction of the European Union (EU) Settlement Procedure in 2008 aimed at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel investigations by the European Commission (EC). We use a data set consisting of 579 firms groups convicted by the EC for cartelization from 2000 to 2015 to investigate...

Due to being much better documented, legal cartels have recently attracted the interest of many researchers who aim to understand the functioning of illegal cartels in detail. This paper contributes to the question of what we can learn from legal cartels by taking a closer look at the cement...

We investigate the impact of cartel breakdowns on merger activity. Merging information on cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) between 2000 and 2011 with a detailed data set of worldwide merger activity, we find that, first, the average number of all merger transactions increase...

We analyze horizontal mergers when the acquirer holds a passive partial ownership stake (PPO) in the target firm prior to the merger. We show that a PPO reduces the minimal synergy level necessary to make a merger beneficial for consumers. It follows that an antitrust authority ignoring existing...