Investigating Transatlantic Merger Policy Convergence

25 Years of European Merger Control

“…Similar to this study, Szücs (2012) investigates the convergence between US and EU merger policy following the 2004 EU merger policy reform. In particular, he uses a sample of 309 EU and 286 US merger cases scrutinized by DG Comp and the FTC, respectively, between 1991 and 2008.…”

“…It is argued that the dominance test was deficient in cases of collective dominance and tacit collusion, and that the "substantial lessening of competition" test employed by the United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be preferable. After the 2004 reform, the test used by the European Commission can be most accurately described as a significant impediment of effective competition (SIEC) test, which is more closely aligned with US practice (Bergman et al, 2007;Szücs, 2012).…”

“…The merger reform reduces the probability of challenge by between 8 and 16 percentage points. also estimates separate pre-and post-reform models and applies the methodology used by Bergman et al (2010), Szücs (2012), and Bergman et al (2016) by predicting the probability of challenge for pre-reform mergers using the post-reform model and vice versa.…”

EU Merger Policy Predictability Using Random Forests

“…While the authors report about 82% correct predictions for the EU models and above 90% correct predictions for the US models, they do not discuss these results in the paper nor do they report the percentage of correct predictions for the intervention and no-intervention cases separately. Szücs (2012) investigates the convergence between US and EU merger policy following the 2004 EU merger policy reform using a sample of 309 EU and 286 US merger cases decided by DG Comp and the FTC, respectively, between 1991 and 2008. For each of the pre-reform EU, post-reform EU and US merger samples, he estimates a logit model on the decision to intervene and then uses the estimated models to predict the probability of intervention for each merger case from the point of view of both competition authorities (similar to Bergman, Coate, Jakobsson, and Ulrick (2010)).…”

“…This revision implies that the creation of a dominant position is no longer a necessary condition for intervention and, therefore, aligns the test used by DG Comp more closely with US practice (Bergman, Coate, Jakobsson, and Ulrick, 2010;Szücs, 2012).…”