The price effect of past mergers has been extensively researched over the last two decades. The overwhelming majority of these studies pool post-merger data to estimate the average price effect of a merger. Merger guidelines agree that mergers should be approved if market dynamics, such as...

One of the central tenets of industrial organisation is that increasing/decreasing market concentration is likely to lead to increased/reduced markups. But does this affect every consumer to the same extent? Previous literature agrees that there can be significant price dispersion even in the...

Major record labels have direct and indirect ownership in Spotify, which raises the obvious question: do major labels use their influence over music streaming to make it harder for their upstream competitors (independent labels) to compete. In search of evidence to answer this question, this...

This paper draws from the view of social historians and hypothesizes that both wealthy and Protestant residents of Dublin were fleeing the city due to distaste for its local government politics and taxation, in an era when local government was gaining importance. We use a limited...

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 is an ex-post evaluation of how innovation changed following mergers and subsequent policy interventions, using an industry case study involving the 5-to-3 consolidation of three related mergers in the worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) industry, in 2011/12. Unlike most previous empirical...

In this review of retrospective European merger studies we provide a discussion of the price effect of analysed mergers and examine whether the antitrust agency made the right decisions. We find that remedied mergers, on average, were not followed by a price-increase, suggesting that, in our...

It is widely believed that deterrence constitutes the most important impact of competition policy, but this seems to be largely a matter faith rather than based on any empirical evidence. This paper present a rare attempt to quantify the deterrence effect of cartel policy. It develops a...