This short paper argues that the COVID-19 crisis provides an opportunity for improvements in long term growth in the EU by allowing the exit of zombie firms that trap industries into low productivity cycles, limited technology diffusion, and weak economic dynamism. To seize this opportunity,...

The purpose of this study is to assess whether competition agencies (“CAs”) do, and in turn should, enjoy an unfettered discretionary power in the context of the investigation of competition law infringements or whether their margin of discretion should be subject to certain limits. To this...

The main objective of this paper is thus to examine the state of adoption and implementation of competition rules in the 12 Mediterranean countries (the "Euromed countries") engaged in association agreements with the EC in the framework of the Barcelona Declaration of November 1995. Indeed,...

Antitrust doctrine is under heavy fire in the academic literature. Modern criticism of antitrust doctrine attacks three ‘limits’ that would excessively constrain enforcement of the law: (i) the consumer welfare standard, (ii) the rule of reason, and (iii) a self-imposed neglect of labor...

Price discrimination is one of the most complex areas of EC competition law. There are several reasons for this. First, the concept of price discrimination covers many different practices (discounts and rebates, tying, selective price cuts, discriminatory input prices set by...

This paper looks at whether the standard unilateral effects model can be applied to non-price competition parameters such as innovation. This question arises because competition authorities are intervening in horizontal mergers that are found to give rise to a “significant impediment to...

A large body of scholarship demonstrates that press coverage is beset with biases. Contemporary media coverage of large firms operating in the digital economy suggests that some of these biases may be at work when the press describes them as “monopolies.” We test this hypothesis by analyzing...

Enthused by China's conversion to the free market system in 1978 and its adoption of Western-style market institutions, the world has spent the last few decades turning a blind eye to China's real “governance” problem: that a shadow Party-State system permeates all branches of the economy....

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Professor Jean Tirole in 2014 has generated intense interest about his brainchild theory of two-sided markets. Against this background, this paper explores whether there is such a thing as a unified theory of two-sided markets and whether the...