We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by … 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger … other banks. Other merger properties, including the size and risk profile of targets, the geographic overlap of merging …

the period 1990–2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and … decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four maintained assumptions, merger control might be interpreted to be effective if … rents accruing due to the increased market power observed around the merger announcement are reversed by the antitrust …