Utilizing Connor's International Cartel Database and employing difference-in-differences methodology, we find that market concentration, the number of buyers and cartel duration have significant impacts on cartel overcharges. We also find that the European Commission's 2006 guidelines on the...

Trade conflicts, geopolitical tensions, digital disruption, and the climate crisis pose major challenges for the European Union (EU) and its member states. As called for in the Draghi Report, industrial policy measures can increase competitiveness, strengthen resilience, and facilitate the twin...

In digital markets, personal data is increasingly monetized. As a result, the areas of competition and data protection law collide and the competences of enforcers of these fields of law (i.e. competition and data protection authorities) also overlap. These overlapping competences are not...

Competition authorities across the European Union wield extensive investigative powers in enforcing antitrust laws. These powers - including dawn raids, home searches and document seizures - can impinge upon fundamental rights such as privacy, the inviolability of the home, legal privilege, the...

This Competition Policy Brief discusses whether 'legal professional privilege' ('LPP') should be extended to cover certain in-house lawyer advice. It briefly outlines the position taken by the EU courts on this matter and the calls for such an extension of LPP in the context of the evaluation of...

This study constructs a model of exclusive-offer competition between two existing up-stream firms. Under exclusive-offer competition, the upstream firm's profit depends on the rival's exclusive offer. If the rival makes an exclusive offer acceptable for the downstream firm, the upstream firm is...

The Handbook on EU Competition Law - Rules Applicable to Merger Control gives an overview about EU legislation applicable in the field of Merger Control. The new 2010 edition includes the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty.

The use of an economics, effects-based, approach in EU Law is normally understood within the context of the enforcement of the EU Competition provisions. It embodies the post-Modernisation shift from a formalistic application of these provisions, and particularly of Article 102 TFEU, to a method...

For several years, access to evidence has been identified by potential claimants as one of the main difficulties in bringing damages actions for breach of competition rules in general, and class actions in this area in particular, in the European Union. As regards the former, Directive...

For the past decade, U.S. communications policymakers have been debating the need for net-neutrality regulation of "dominant" communications carrier platforms. One of the reasons advanced for regulating these carriers derives from a fear that carriers could reduce competition in the production...

This paper investigates the effects of competition laws and regulations on manufacturing firms productivity in Latin American countries (LACs), addressing a gap in existing research. Leveraging firm-level panel data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys across 14 LAC economies and competition...

Utilizing Connor's International Cartel Database and employing difference-in-differences methodology, we find that market concentration, the number of buyers and cartel duration have significant impacts on cartel overcharges. We also find that the European Commission's 2006 guidelines on the...

Since Mario Draghi's 2024 report on "The Future of European Competitiveness", identifying European (i) weaknesses in global innovation and, consequently, in global market impact, as well as (ii) regulatory overburden, the term competitiveness has been propelled into massive popularity. For...

State-owned firms from third countries play an increasingly significant role in international mergers and acquisitions, raising concerns about distortions of competition. These distortions arise from state-backed financial advantages, preferential treatment, and industrial policy objectives,...

Commercial sports belong to the biggest entertainment industries in the world and, at the same time, are regularly raising antitrust concerns. This is partly due to the omnipresence of powerful market-internal regulators. These sport governing bodies set, implement, and enforce the rules and...

Bedrohen große Vermögensverwalter wie BlackRock den Wettbewerb? Der Autor zeigt, dass es einer wettbewerblichen Schadenstheorie unter Berücksichtigung der rechtlichen und tatsächlichen Rahmenbedingungen an Plausibilität fehlt. In der Theorie lassen sich weder ausreichende...

As of 7 March 2024, the EU Commission began to enforce its controversial Digital Markets Act (DMA). This article sheds light on the recent debate. It lists the dos and don'ts of the DMA as well as stakeholder reactions to them before tracing some of the underlying motivations and reasoning that...

Expanding the digital economy represents a major challenge for EU competition policy and regulations. Despite their importance, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) receive minimal attention regarding their perspectives on the issue. Hence, the main aim of the paper is to examine their...

This Report provides an overview of how the Commission and the national competition authorities of the EU Member States ('European competition authorities') have enforced EU antitrust and merger rules concerning medicines and certain other medical products in the period 2018-2022. It also...

Corporate sustainability due diligence (CSDD) is needed in order to achieve a transition towards a green economy and deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, the Commission proposed the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) in 2019. In March 2024, the Council...

Following the judgment of the Court of Justice and especially the Opinion of the Advocate General in the CDC Hydrogen Peroxide case, arbitration agreements on disputes concerning damages for infringements of the competition rules of the TFEU have been interpreted as being contrary to the...

Antitrust and market regulation, rather than being "flip sides of the same coin," populate a spectrum that ranges from a truly laissez faire economic system at one end to a command economy at the other. Competition policy and regulation have different strengths and will thus be preferred in...

The traditional institutional model of a competition agency has assumed entrusting competition protection to a single authority. Over time, more and more often national competition authorities are being entrusted not only with competition enforcement but also with other functions (tasks). And...

This article oscillates around the intersection of sustainability and digital platforms, which is an increasingly important and complex area of study in which digital platforms can have both a positive and a negative influence. The interaction between sustainability and digital platforms is...

Text mining and corpus linguistic methods are used to analyze 11,000 EU competition law decisions and judgments. This reveals a shift in the competition vocabulary from ordoliberalism in the 1970-80s to neoliberalism in the post-2000s. While the Commission has partly adopted a neoliberal...

In this paper, we comment on the debate about guidelines for Art. 102 TFEU in the face of the challenges brought by digital ecosystems and abuse of dominance in related markets. We take the perspective of dynamic competition economics and derive four recommendations for the future enforcement of...