Mergers and the Value of Antitrust Deterrence

Bjorn Eckbo ()

Journal of Finance, 1992, vol. 47, issue 3, 1005-29

Abstract: While the U.S. has pursued a vigorous antitrust policy towards horizontal mergers over the past four decades, mergers in Canada have until recently been permitted to take place in a virtually unrestricted antitrust environment. The absence of an antitrust overhang in Canada presents an interesting opportunity to test the conjecture that the rigid market share and concentration criteria of the U.S. policy effectively deters a significant number of potentially collusive mergers. The effective deterrence hypothesis implies that the probability of a horizontal merger being anticompetitive is higher in Canada than in the U.S. However, parameters in cross-sectional regressions reject the market power hypothesis on samples of both U.S. and Canadian mergers. Judging from the Canadian evidence, there simply isn't much to deter. Copyright 1992 by American Finance Association.

Date: 1992
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (100)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-1082%2819920 ... O%3B2-J&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

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:bla:jfinan:v:47:y:1992:i:3:p:1005-29

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.afajof.org/membership/join.asp

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Finance from American Finance Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().