The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

Bei Verstößen gegen geltendes Wettbewerbsrecht entstehen typischerweise Schäden durch überhöhte Preise und entgangenen Gewinn bei nachgelagerten Wirtschaftsstufen. Hierfür besteht ein gesetzlicher Schadensersatzanspruch. Auf europäischer Ebene wird derzeit ein Rechtsrahmen diskutiert, mit...

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages - characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation - the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the derivation...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of competition policy by estimating its impact on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over the period 1995-2005. We find a robust positive and significant effect of competition policy as measured by...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

The literature identifies a significant drop in merger control enforcement activity on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade. Furthermore, this drop in enforcement activity is convincingly connected to enforcement problems on the sides of the competition agencies. This paper goes...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of methods for the empirical ex post evaluation of merger control decisions. It develops a competition-policy oriented framework of assessment criteria for the leading evaluation methods and applies them to structural modeling and simulation,...

This article analyzes the basic characteristics of the Argentine competition law and the way in which it has been enforced in several important antitrust cases. We begin with a section that introduces the evolution of the law, followed by another section about the basic economic and legal...

For a general class of oligopoly models with price competition, we analyze the impact of ex-ante leniency programs in antitrust regulation on the endogenous maximal-sustainable cartel price. This impact depends upon industry characteristics including its cartel culture. Our analysis disentangles...

We analyze maximal cartel prices in infinitely-repeated oligopoly models under leniency where fines are linked to illegal gains, as often outlined in existing antitrust regulation, and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. We introduce cartel culture that describes how...