We examine the impact to date of the Reserve Bank of Australia's decision to reduce interchange fees on credit cards in Australia by almost half. We find that, in the short run, issuers have recovered between 30 and 40 percent of the loss of interchange fees. Merchants have benefited from lower...

Under most federal environmental laws and some health and safety laws, states may apply for "primacy," that is, authority to implement and enforce federal law, through a process known as "authorization." Some observers fear that states use authorization to adopt more lax policies in a regulatory...

In this paper, we provide some background on the merger approval process in China and the InBev acquisition, and then discuss the implications of MOFCOM’s decision and its other statements on merger policy for the future of merger control in China.

The outcome will provide a test of the power of efficiency arguments in merger cases. Howard Chang, David S. Evans, & Richard Schmalensee (Global Economics Group)

Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous...

This Chapter provides a survey of the economics literature on multi-sided platforms with particular focus on competition policy issues, including market definition, mergers, monopolization, and coordinated behavior. It provides a survey of the general industrial organization theory of...