Effective European Antitrust: Does EC Merger Policy Generate Deterrence

Joseph Clougherty, Tomaso Duso, Miyu Lee and Jo Seldeslachts

No 1523, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990-2009 period. Our empirical results suggest that phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as – unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions – phase-1 remedies lead to fewer merger notifications in subsequent years. Furthermore, the deterrence effects of phase-1 remedies work best in high-concentration industries; i.e., industries where the HHI is above the 0.2 cut-off level employed by the EC. Additionally, we find that phase-1 remedies do not deter clearly pro-competitive mergers, but do deter potentially anti-competitive mergers in high-concentration industries.

Keywords: Merger; deterrence; European Commission; merger policy; competition policy; antitrust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 K40 L40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 p.
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eur, nep-ind and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.520574.de/dp1523.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: EFFECTIVE EUROPEAN ANTITRUST: DOES EC MERGER POLICY GENERATE DETERRENCE? (2016)
Journal Article: Effective European Antitrust: Does EC Merger Policy Generate Deterrence? (2016)
Working Paper: Effective European Antitrust: Does EC Merger Policy Generate Deterrence (2015)
Working Paper: Effective European antitrust: Does EC merger policy generate deterrence? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1523

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().