The Impact of the More Economic Approach on EU Merger Decisions

Lea Bernhardt () and Ralf Dewenter
Additional contact information
Lea Bernhardt: Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Postal: Department of Economics, Holstenhofweg 85, 22043 Hamburg

No 195/2021, Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg

Abstract: This paper analyses all final merger decisions by the European Commission from the beginning of 1990 up to the end of 2019. We use a novel dataset, containing information about 6245 merger cases from all economic sectors and combining all sorts of decisions, inclusive of withdrawn and prohibited cases. Using text analyses techniques, we first analyse merger decisions documents in order to find trends and differences in language and wording with respect to the 2004 regulation. As a result, we find a shift in favour of terms associated with the More Economic Approach. On the contrary, the concept of dominance has decreased since 2004, indicating a strong decline in structural market parameters for merger reviews. While the tonality is found to be largely positive (especially for cleared cases), again, a change under different merger regimes seems to be evident. Second, accounting for differences in the usage of competition-related terms and by using simple OLS and logit regressions, we find that the duration of the merger review has increased significantly after the 2004 reform. At the same time, the probability of a merger being prohibited has not changed significantly.

Keywords: Merger policy; Competition policy; Regulatory reform; EU Commission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 K21 L40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2022-08-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-law and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.hsu-hh.de/fgvwl/wp-content/uploads/sites/572/2022/06/WP195.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ris:vhsuwp:2021_195

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Bekcmann ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).