actually reduce consumer surplus which opposes the use of an efficiency defense in merger control. …

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 … other banks. Other merger properties, including the size and risk profile of targets, the geographic overlap of merging …

that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the … concerns about the Commission’s merger enforcement being too lax. …

scrutinized by the European Commission between 1995 and 2014. We show that concentration, as measured by the market-specific post-merger … dimension analyzed. Strict past merger enforcement negatively correlates with concentration. Yet, this effect is stronger in the …

's takeover strategy and the decision problem of the antitrust authority. We derive implications for a merger control approach to … acquirer firm to learn the merger synergies with the target firm in advance. The realization of a synergy is uncertain ex ante …, so that a direct merger exhibits a downside risk not only for the merging candidates but also for consumers. We show that …