The existing literature concerning the impact of cross-border merger activity on domestic wages can be split into two camps: 1) those focusing on positive ‘spillover’ effects; 2) those focusing on negative ‘bargaining’ effects. Motivated in part by the lack of scholarship spanning these...

It is common to apply a SSNIP test with a uniform price increase on all products in the candidate market. We show that in situations with asymmetries – for example one product having a limited sale – a uniform SSNIP test can suggest that the relevant market should include more products even...

The SSNIP test for market definition requires information about demand substitution and profitability. If detailed information about demand is not available, observed effects of a shock in the industry may be an alternative source of evidence. In the existing literature, shock analysis has...

Farrell and Shapiro proposed a simple test of the possible upward pricing pressure (UPP) following a merger. They showed that the test may give false negatives, that is, indicate that a merger may not give an UPP, while a more comprehensive test would indicate the opposite. We show that their...

The economics of crime and punishment postulates that higher punishment leads to lower crime levels, or less severe crime. It is however hard to get empirical support for this intuitive relationship. This paper offers a model that contributes to explain why this is the case. We show that if...

Motivated by observations in the Norwegian airline industry in the late 90s, we develop a semicollusive model with collusion on gross prices and competition on contracts for large customers (corporate contracts). The theoretical predictions are tested on detailed data on gross prices, large...

This study develops and uses a successive oligopoly model, with an unobservable non-linear tariff between upstream and downstream firms, to analyze the possible anti-competitive effects of an upstream merger. We find that an upstream merger may lead to higher average prices paid by downstream...

A common approach to merger simulations used in antitrust cases is to calibrate demand from market shares and a few additional parameters. When the products involved in the merger case are differentiated along several dimensions, the resulting diversion ratios may be very different from those...