The European Commission (EC) has long intended to play a leadership role in setting a pan-European competition policy; yet, both centralized and decentralized tendencies have been manifest in the European context for competition policy. It is not clear the whether these leadership intentions...

Using a comprehensive data set on retail prices across the euro area, we analyse within- and cross-country price dispersion in European countries. First, we study price dispersion over time, by investigating the time-series evolution of the coefficient of variation, calculated from price levels....