Numerous recently uncovered cartels operated along the supply chain, with firms at one end facilitating collusion at the other - hub-and-spoke arrangements. These cartels are hard to rationalize because they induce double marginalization and higher costs. We examine Canada's alleged bread cartel...

This comment was filed with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division on December 31, 2009, as "Comments Regarding Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement Issues in Our 21st Century Economy" in response to the DOJ/USDA request for public comments for the agencies' joint workshops on antitrust...

In this paper, we review the literature on declining business dynamism and its implications in the United States and propose a unifying theory to analyze the symptoms and the potential causes of this decline. We first highlight 10 pronounced stylized facts related to declining business dynamism...

The question of whether and how partial common-ownership links between strategically interacting firms affect firm objectives and behavior has been the subject of theoretical inquiry for decades. Since then, the growth of intermediated asset management and consolidation in the asset-management...

This paper examines whether cartel breakdown provokes a period of intensive merger activity amongst the former cartelists, designed to re-establish tacit collusion. Using a novel application of recurrent event survival analysis for a pooled sample of 84 European cartels, it finds that mergers...

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...

Previous work on exit in declining industries has neglected mergers. We examine a simple model that predicts which declining industries experience horizontal mergers. Mergers are more likely if 1) market concentration is high; 2) the inverse demand curve is steep at high levels of output and...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

We develop a macroeconomic framework in which firms are large and have market power with respect to both products and labor. Each firm maximizes a share-weighted average of shareholder utilities, which makes the equilibrium independent of price normalization. In a one-sector economy, if returns...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...