Efficiency of EU Merger Control in the 1990-2008 Period

Goran Serdarević () and Petr Teply

No 2009/28, Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies

Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of key regulatory changes in the European merger control and to evaluate their real impact on the efficiency of merger regulation. Our main contribution is an empirical analysis of a unique representative sample of 161 horizontal mergers covering the final regulatory assessments during the period from 1990 to 2008. We use stock market data to identify those cases where there are discrepancies between the Commission and market evaluation of the merger. The PROBIT model is then used to further investigate the sources of these discrepancies. Our results suggest that the Commission’s decisions are not purely explained by the motive of protecting consumer welfare and that other political and institutional factors do play a role in setting policy. We did not find evidence that the Commission protects competitors at the expense of consumers and foreign firms. Moreover, we conclude that the regulatory reform introduced in 2004 has significantly enhanced efficiency of the European merger control. To the authors’ best knowledge, this paper is the first study using stock market data to evaluate an impact of the recent EU merger control.

Keywords: merger control; European Union; political economy; regulatory reform; PROBIT model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L4 K21 C25 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-eec and nep-reg
Date: 2009-12, Revised 2009-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/default/file/download/id/13511 (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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2009_28

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Lenka Herrmannova ().