The aim of this paper is to describe in detail a set of newly developed indicators of the quality of competition policy, Competition Policy Indexes, or CPIs. The CPIs measure the deterrence properties of a competition policy in a jurisdiction, where for competition policy we mean the antitrust...

Managers are increasingly uncertain over the source (home-nation or foreign-nation) of antitrust holdup for domestic mergers with significant international implications. I propose a conceptual framework that predicts the source of antitrust holdup for domestic mergers. Under idealized...

The literature on antitrust in an open-economy setting is inconclusive with respect to the role played by trade-balance on the tenor of domestic merger policy. Using a panel data set composed of US merger reviews by industrial sector over the 1997-2001 period, I empirically test the impact of...

This paper investigates how the formation of larger buyers affects a supplier's profits and, by doing so, his incentives to undertake non-contractible activities. We first identify two chan-nels of buyer power, which allows larger buyers to obtain discounts. We subsequently exam-ine the effects...

We develop a model in which two firms that have proposed to merge are privately informed about merger-specific efficiencies. This enables the firms to influence the merger control procedure by strategically revealing their information to an antitrust authority. Although the information improves...

The recent ‘open-economy industrial organization’ literature generally finds export-orientation to enhance the weight of post-merger international competitive gains; thereby, favoring lenient domestic merger policy. We observe, however, that mergers seldom generate the ‘significant...

This paper examines the role played by uncertainty and sunk costs on the timeseries fluctuations in industry structure as captured by the number of firms and establishments, and concentration. Using an extensive dataset covering 267 U.S. manufacturing industries over a 30-year period, our...

Antitrust policy involves not just the regulation of anti-competitive behavior, but also an important deterrence effect. Neither scholars nor policymakers have fully researched the deterrence effects of merger policy tools, as they have been unable to empirically measure these effects. We...

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effects on industry performance (profits and social welfare) of exogenously changing the number of firms in a Cournot framework. This amounts to an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and production...

Consider the intertemporal volatility of the number of firms and establishments within an industry over a relatively long span of time. Data from the U.S. manufacturing sector shows that this degree of endemic volatility varies widely across industries. Examining the determinants of this...