Thema Wettbewerb und Regulierung

Mit Roaming gegen Funklöcher: Wie der Netzausbau in ländlichen Regionen gelingen kann

Studie zum Mobilfunknetzausbau in dünn besiedelten Regionen vergleicht drei Kooperationsmodelle – Weniger Kosten für Anbieter bei umfassendem Network Sharing, aber geringere Netzabdeckung – KonsumentInnen profitieren am stärksten von Roaming-Abkommen – Gebietsabsprachen zwischen Anbietern erhöhen Netzabdeckung – Behörden könnten Roaming-Abkommen ...

Auch die Anbieter profitieren vom Roaming: Interview mit Pio Baake

What Drives Green Capabilities? Evidence from German Firm-level Data

Germany is leading in green competitiveness of its product exports. Deploying the green economic complexity methodology using German AFiD firm-level micro data, this study seeks to analyze explanatory variables for this trend such as green R&D subsidies and subnational density of related green technologies in the light of path dependencies in firms accumulation of green capabilities. It...

The rise of common ownership: Europe vs the US

Common ownership - when an investor holds shares in two companies - has recently attracted significant attention from policy-makers and researchers, studying mainly US firms. European firms, however, are different as top investors with large stakes, like governments, founding families and foundations are much more prevalent. This paper takes a well-known common ownership measure derived from...

Common Ownership Patterns in the European Banking Sector – The Impact of the Financial Crisis

We provide a description of ownership patterns in the top 25 European banks for the period 2003–2015, where we especially focus on the global financial crisis. Investment managers, such as Blackrock, are dominant in terms of number of block holdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led...

Competitors’ Reactions to Big Tech Acquisitions: Evidence from Mobile Apps

Since 2010, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have acquired more than 400 companies. Competition authorities did not scrutinize most of these transactions and blocked none. This raised concerns that GAFAM acquisitions target potential competitors yet fly under the radar of current merger control due to the features of the digital economy. We empirically study the competitive effects ...

Assessing EU Merger Control through Compensating Efficiencies

Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and ...

The Effect of Mergers on Variety in Grocery Retailing

We study a merger between two Dutch supermarket chains to assess its effect on the depth as well as composition of assortment. We adopt a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits local variation in pre-merger competitive conditions and thus in the merger outcomes. To define our control group, we account for selection on observables through a matching procedure. We observe that, after the merger, ...

The Leniency Rule Revisited: Experiments on Cartel Formation with Open Communication

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel, sanctioning only the latter. To this aim, we introduce a participant in the role of the competition authority, ...

Krankenhausfusionen können sich auf das Leistungsangebot auswirken

In den letzten Jahrzehnten kam es auf vielen europäischen Krankenhausmärkten zu einer Fusionswelle, die zu einer zunehmenden Marktkonzentration geführt hat. Die Auswirkungen von Krankenhausfusionen und die wirksame Durchsetzung von Wettbewerbsrecht wurden von der Politik diskutiert, aber wissenschaftlich nicht ausreichend beleuchtet. Im vorliegenden Bericht wird anhand des französischen Krankenhaussektors ...