Revisions incorporated into the Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 2010 claim that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission consider anticompetitive effects to product “variety” when evaluating mergers. The Guidelines do not, however, explain the methodology or tools that can...

Common ownership fundamentally upsets the well-settled merger enforcement ecosystem. Not only it challenges basic principles informing merger policy such as the presumed profitability of mergers for the merging firms and the merger-specificity of potential efficiencies but also it works against...

Der Zusammenschluss von Unternehmen trägt umfassend zur Dynamik der Unternehmenslandschaft bei und ist üblicherweise an die konjunkturelle Entwicklung gekoppelt. Bei Fusionen und Übernahmen unter Beteiligung deutscher Firmen haben sich Konjunktur und Zusammenschlüsse jedoch seit der...

Merger value is frequently evaluated in single market contexts without considering possible gains stemming from firms' multimarket presence. This study concentrates on the question through which channels, and of which magnitude, mergers among multimarket firms create incremental value. We...

Recently there has been a notable increase in interest in antitrust law in much of the world. This chapter discusses antitrust policy toward horizontal mergers, the area of antitrust that has seen some of the most dramatic improvements in both economic tools and the application of economics in...

We investigate the impact of the 1996 UP/SP railroads merger on rail rates for potential 2-to-1 shippers. As part of its merger conditions, the Surface Transportation Board (STB) granted trackage rights to BNSF to preserve competition for these shippers. Using the STB's Carload Waybill Sample...

One of the most striking and undertheorized aspects of fields that commercialize patented technologies is the dynamic interplay of structural forces pushing toward consolidation. Of course, technological industries are complex ecosystems featuring numerous players of different sizes along the...

We examine merging firms' additions and removals of products for a sample of 66 mergers across a wide variety of consumer packaged goods markets. We find that mergers lead to a net reduction in the number of products offered by merging firms. Merging firms tend to both drop and add products at...

In this paper, we summarize the economic literature on non-price effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Specifically, we discuss the effects of M&As on innovation, product variety, and sustainability. Although the relationship is theoretically ambiguous, the vast majority of ex-post...