Fifty is the New Forty: EU Merger Policy Permits Higher Market Shares After the 2004 Reform

Federico Mini ()

Review of Industrial Organization, 2018, vol. 53, issue 3, No 7, 535-561

Abstract: Abstract I analyze empirically all of the European Commission’s decisions regarding “unilateral effects” aspects of horizontal mergers before and after the 2004 reform, which introduced the “significant impediment to effective competition” test in merger policy. I find that, after the reform, the Commission did not change its stance toward mergers to monopoly or quasi-monopoly (almost always challenged) and mergers in un-concentrated markets (almost never). The new test produced more frequent challenges when the combined entity is not the largest firm, but these cases remain rare. The Commission’s stance toward mergers that fall between these polar opposites appears to have been tougher pre-reform ceteris paribus.

Keywords: Merger policy reform; European Union; Unilateral effects; Antitrust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11151-018-9645-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:revind:v:53:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11151-018-9645-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... on/journal/11151/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11151-018-9645-9

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Industrial Organization is currently edited by L.J. White

More articles in Review of Industrial Organization from Springer, The Industrial Organization Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().