The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and state aids. This year’s article provides first a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist’s team and surveys the main achievements of the Directorate General for Competition over 2016/2017. The article then reviews the economic work undertaken in one merger case between Dow/DuPont, which raised specific issues related to innovation, as well as in an antitrust case on parity clauses related to Amazon e-books.

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We introduce labor contracts in a framework of optimal redistribution: firms have some local market power and try to discriminate among heterogeneous workers. In this setting we show that if the firms have perfect information, i.e., they perfectly discriminate against workers and take all the surplus, the best tax function is flat. If firms have imperfect information, i.e., if they offer incentive contracts, then (under some assumptions) the best redistributive taxation is regressive. Copyright 2007 Blackwell Publishing, Inc..

The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and state aids. This year’s article provides first a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist’s team and surveys some of the main achievements of the Directorate General for Competition over 2017/2018. The article then reviews: the Google Search (Shopping) case, the role of price discrimination in state aid cases; and the use of counterfactuals in merger cases where alternative transactions might have occurred absent the merger.