25 Years of European Merger Control

Pauline Affeldt, Tomaso Duso and Florian Szücs

No 1797, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: We study the evolution of the EC’s merger decision procedure over the first 25 years of European competition policy. Using a novel dataset constructed at the level of the relevant markets and containing all merger cases over the 1990-2014 period, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to structural market parameters were applied over time. Using non-parametric machine learning techniques, we find that the importance of market shares and concentration measures has declined while the importance of barriers to entry and the risk of foreclosure has increased in the EC’s merger assessment following the 2004 merger policy reform.

Keywords: Merger policy; DG competition; causal forests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 L40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 p.
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-com, nep-eur, nep-ind, nep-law and nep-pay
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Related works:
Journal Article: 25 years of European merger control (2021)
Journal Article: 25 years of European merger control (2021)
Working Paper: 25 Years of European Merger Control (2020)
Working Paper: 25 Years of European Merger Control (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1797

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