The ministerial proposal for a 10th amendment of the German competition law particularly addresses abuse control and seeks to tighten this pillar of competition policy against the background of the challenges from the digital economy. Next to extending the classic policy instruments of abuse...

Nowadays, merger control predominantly relies upon a strict analysis of the effects from merger and acquisitions on effective competition. However, there is scope for so-called public interest considerations in several European merger control regimes and recently a number of European politicians...

Market concentration often leads to unnecessarily high prices and reduced innovation. European merger control positively affects competition and productivity, though not yet perfectly effectively. In times of increased market concentration, merger control needs to be enforced even more...

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...

Under the regime of Regulation 1/2003 on the implementation of the rules of competition laid down in Articles 101 and 102 TFEU undertakings are obliged to take care by themselves of their compliance with the competition rules. For practical purposes this is also true when it comes to the rules...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers...

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In...

In this comprehensive review of ex-post merger studies price effects of horizontal transactions are evaluated. By combining and further analyzing the results of 52 retrospective studies on 82 mergers or merger-like transactions it can be shown that the industry alone is no strong indication for...