An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for...

We analyze evidence production in merger control as a delegation problem in an inquisitorial competition policy system. The antitrust agency’s incentives to produce evidence on the efficiency of a merger proposal depend critically on its action set. Allowing for a compromising remedy solution...

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...

This article finds that non-controlling minority shareholdings among competitors lower the sustainability of collusion. This is the case under an even greater variety of situations than was indicated by earlier literature. The collusion destabilizing effect of minority shareholdings is mainly...

Die Aufwendungen für Online-Werbung sind in den vergangenen Jahren rasant gewachsen. Ihr Anteil am gesamten deutschen Werbemarkt lag 2007 bei sieben Prozent und die Tendenz zeigt weiter steil nach oben. Der Versuch von Microsoft, den weltweit zweitgrößten Suchmaschinenbetreiber, Yahoo, zu...

Mergers that substantially lessen competition are challenged by antitrust authorities. Instead of blocking anticompetitive transitions straight away, authorities might choose to negotiate with the merging parties and allow the transactions to proceed with modifications that restore or preserve...

We use a sample of 167 mergers during the period 1990-2002 involving 544 firms either as merging firms or competitors. We contrast a measure of the merger’s profitability based on event studies with one based on accounting data. We find positive and significant correlations between them when...

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 European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions organised a seminar for its company network on November 29-30, 2007, hosted by Santander at its corporate headquarters in Madrid, Spain. In intensive discussions over the two days, 32 representatives from companies,...