The working papers published in the Series constitute work in progress circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comments. Views expressed represent exclusively the authors' own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of the editor.

Private damage claims against cartels may have negative effects on leniency: whereas whistleblowers obtain full immunity regarding the public cartel fines, they have no or only restricted protection against private third-party damage claims. This may stabilize cartels. We run an experiment to study this issue. Firms choose whether to join a cartel, may apply for leniency afterward, and then potentially face private damages. We find that the implementation of private damage claims reduces cartel formation but makes cartels indeed more stable. The negative effect of damages is avoided in a novel setting where the whistleblower is also protected from damages (JEL C90, L41, L44).

We present a method for identifying up- and downstream industries in inter-industry datasets via input–output tables. We apply this approach to aggregated European input–output data and present results on identified industry links and their sensitivity to threshold definitions. We furthermore test the time-consistency of the up- and downstream assignments based on input–output tables, and discuss the limitations of this method. Finally, the method is used to test anti-competitive effects of non-controlling minority shareholdings.