Legal and illegal cartels in the European cement industry

Nikolaus Fink and Stefan Frübing

No 15-066, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Due to being much better documented, legal cartels have recently attracted the interest of many researchers who aim to understand the functioning of illegal cartels in detail. This paper contributes to the question of what we can learn from legal cartels by taking a closer look at the cement industry which has a rich history of both legal and illegal cartels. We undertake a cross-country comparison for Austria, Germany, Poland and Norway, providing narrative evidence for many traits of the cases based on a variety of detailed sources. We identify similarities between legal and illegal cartels in aspects such as monitoring efforts, information exchange, the importance of industry associations and the role of capacities, whereas we also find substantial differences in the allocation of clients, reactions to deviations and pricing schedules.

Keywords: cartels; collusion; cement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L41 L43 L61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-his, nep-ind and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:15066

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