This paper analyzes the impact of a merger in the French supermarket industry on food prices. Using consumer panel data, we compare the changes in prices for merging and rival firms in affected and comparison markets. We use a novel definition of affected markets when some firms have a local pricing strategy and others a more centralized pricing strategy. We find that prices increase significantly following the merger, and that the merging firms lose market shares. For the rivals, the price increases are larger in local markets, in which concentration increased and differentiation changed after the merger.

This article examines whether ownership arrangements between food firms and intermediaries improve the export performance of the former. We develop a theoretical model of trade with vertically‐linked industries whereby upstream manufacturers compete in export markets and may decide to acquire ownership stakes in an intermediary. The model highlights how more productive firms succeed in managing the double marginalization problem and in reducing the costs of exporting through forward acquisition. The predictions from the model are tested using firm‐level data on the French food industry. The results demonstrate that acquiring an intermediary lowers prices and distribution costs, and reveal that the benefits from forward acquisitions can be quite large. Conversely, we find that vertical ownership creates a market externality among manufacturers due to the reallocation of market shares from small firms to large firms, thereby forcing some low‐productivity firms to exit foreign markets.

Merger remedies, Antitrust, European Commission, Discrete choice models, Self-organizing maps, K21, L40, D78,

No abstract

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom on the competitive grocery retail sector in France. To that end, I develop a structural model of spatial competition that accounts for (i) market geography on consumers' preferences, and (ii) differences in their shopping list. The demand estimates are used to recover stores' price-cost margin under alternative pricing strategies. I select the best pricing model by applying non-nested tests and show that retailers noticeably distort their offer in highly concentrated markets. Finally, I perform counterfactual experiments to quantify the expected gain of an additional store on consumer welfare and retail prices.