A review of merger decisions in the EU : what can we learn from ex-post evaluations?

DG COMP of the European Commission commissioned a team of academics (lead by Peter Ormosi) at the Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia, to deliver a report, which systematically reviews ex-post evaluations of the impact of merger decisions by EU competition authorities. Ex-post merger evaluations (or merger retrospectives) estimate the impact (typically on price) of mergers by using different econometric techniques. The objective of this report was to review the relevant literature of these merger retrospectives, to discuss what the findings of these studies may imply about the quality of merger decisions, introduce the relevant methodologies, and provide a framework for identifying errors in merger decisions.