The UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has been a highly rated competition law enforcer. Yet its antitrust performance activities fall far short of this image. Here a critical assessment is made of the OFT's antitrust enforcement activities, and the claim that there is quantitative survey evidence...

The enforcement policy of the Egyptian Competition Law reveals that there are two varying approaches in relation to the concept of related parties/single economic unit. The first requires for parties to be related, to be active in the same relevant market. This created discrepancies in practice....

Telecommunications in South Africa is one example of the regulatory state, dating from the early 1990s and comprising the usual elements of commercial operators, ministers issuing periodic policies, a regulator, a competition authority, systems of appeal, and parliamentary oversight. Less...

We provide a comprehensive quantitative assessment of cartels and the related cartel enforcement process in the European Union (EU) from 2001 to 2015. In a first step, we present a detailed characterization of all cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) with respect to various...

This paper finds evidence of an inverse U shape in the number of cartels detected by a Competition Agency (CA) over its lifetime. We interpret this as evidence that, as the CA builds up experience in enforcement, this feeds back into the business community to deter future cartel formation. We...

After earlier waves of privatization, local governments have increasingly taken back control of local service provisions in some sectors and countries and, instead, started providing those services themselves (reverse privatization). Using a unique panel data set on the mode of service provision...

During his presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama criticized sharply the lax antitrust law enforcement record of the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently, his first assistant attorney general for antitrust even went so far as to suggest that the Great Recession was, at least in part,...

The paper explores the interdependencies between corporate and individual leniency programs. In a duopoly model where corporations are separated into representing owners and operating managers, conflicts between the two types of agents arise if the relative benefits of participating in the...

This article argues that while EU competition law rightly takes a functional approach to its subject—the undertaking and its economic activity—a string of cases has been developing leading to what this article coins as the Compass doctrine: economic activity of a public entity falling...

We analyze the consequences of shuttering four Antitrust Division field offices by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013 on corporate market power. Contrary to most criticism, we find little evidence that the closure of field offices cripples local antitrust law enforcement. We document that...