An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform

Tomaso Duso, Klaus Guglery and Florian Szücs

Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems from Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich

Abstract: Based on a database of 326 merger cases scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and 2007, we evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004. We ?rst propose a general framework to assess merger policy effectiveness, which is based on standard oligopoly theory and makes use of stockmarket reactions as an external assessment of the merger and the merger control decision. We then focus on four different dimensions of effectiveness: 1) legal certainty; 2) frequency and determinants of type I and type II errors; 3) rent-reversion achieved by different merger policy tools; and 4) deterrence of anti-competitive mergers. To infer the economic impact of the merger policy reform, we compare the results of our four tests before and after its introduction. Our results suggest that the policy reform seems to have been only a modest improvement of European merger policy.

Keywords: merger control; regulatory reform; EU Commission; event-study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 D78 K21 L4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13217/1/337.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform (2013)
Working Paper: An empirical assessment of the 2004 EU merger policy reform (2012)
Working Paper: An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform (2010)
Working Paper: An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform (2010)
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:trf:wpaper:337

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems from Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg ().