In this article, we revive an old debate in the law and economics literature: the relative role of public and reputational sanctions in deterring misconduct. We propose an empirical framework, which accounts for public sanctions (in our case cartel fines) and a more direct measure of...

This paper examines whether cartel breakdown provokes a period of intensive merger activity amongst the former cartelists, designed to re-establish tacit collusion. Using a novel application of recurrent event survival analysis for a pooled sample of 84 European cartels, it finds that mergers...

Reliable estimates of crime detection probabilities could help design better sanctions and improve our understanding of the efficiency of law enforcement. For cartels, we only have limited knowledge on the rate at which these illegal practices are discovered. In comparison to previous works,...

This paper investigates the deterrent impact of competition enforcement on cartels. It is shown theoretically that if enforcement is effective in deterring and constraining cartels then there will be fewer cartels with low overcharges and fewer with high overcharges. This prediction provides an...

This paper finds evidence of an inverse U shape in the number of cartels detected by a Competition Agency (CA) over its lifetime. We interpret this as evidence that, as the CA builds up experience in enforcement, this feeds back into the business community to deter future cartel formation. We...