Effective European Antitrust: Does Ec Merger Policy Generate Deterrence?

Abstract

We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC)

Market Concentration in Europe: Evidence from Antitrust Markets

“…We tackle these two selection issues with two remedies. First, we include in the regressions a set of variables capturing the prevalence of mergers in the respective industry during the previous 12 months, which should control for the extent of merger waves (Andrade et al, 2001;Clougherty et al, 2016). Thus, we condition concentration effects of our variables of interest on the likelihood of observing mergers.…”

“… See Andrade et al (2001) for the drivers of merger waves andClougherty et al (2016) for the determinants of merging decision and deterrence.…”

25 Years of European Merger Control

“…Results are similar. We decided to use the dummy for comparability with the approach based on machine learning discussed in Section 5.15 As a robustness check, we use industry and year fixed effects separately and include a set of time-varying control variables at the industry based on Worldscope data (e.g., mean size, mean total assets, mean Tobit's q, mean R&D...) as suggested byClougherty and Seldeslachts (2013) andClougherty et al (2016). However, this does not qualitatively change the results.…”

A Step Ahead: Competition Policy for Shared Prosperity and Inclusive Growth

“…Duso, Gugler, and Szücs (2013) find that, since the 2004 EU merger control reform, prohibitions have had no deterrent effects, whereas aborted mergers in either Phase 1 or Phase 2 have had such effects. In a more recent paper, Clougherty et al (2016) find that, of the various EU merger control actions, only Phase 1 remedies have a deterrent effect. These divergent results show that further work is necessary before drawing robust conclusions on the type of actions having the strongest deterrent effects on anticompetitive mergers.…”