While much attention has been given to 'de-politicisation', its reversal through 'repoliticisation' is also possible. We examine 'institutional re-politicisation' - increases in the formal powers and discretion of elected politicians' - in hard cases - policies for regulating Cross-Border...

Based on a database of 326 merger cases scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and 2007, we evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004. We first propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness, which is based on standard...

The duration of merger proceedings held by competition authorities is an important determinant of the efficiency of the entire merger control process. We use a dataset of 2953 Phase I and 92 Phase II investigations completed by the European Commission (EC) between 1999 and 2008 to examine the...