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Common Ownership and Market Entry: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

Competition, Formal Governance and Trust in Alliances: An Experimental Study

We study the role of alliance governance in the behavior of partners in alliances with different degrees of competition. Using data from a lab experiment on 1,009 alliances and 31,662 partners' choices, we explore whether and how alliances succeed in different competitive scenarios, contingent on the use of formal governance mechanisms (termination clauses) and the number of partners in the alliance. ...

R&D Spillovers through RJV Cooperation

We investigate how R&D spillovers propagate across firms linked through Research Joint Ventures (RJVs). Building on the framework developed by Bloom et al. (2013) which considers the opposing effects of knowledge spillovers and product market rivalry, we extend the model to account for RJV cooperation. Since the firm’s decision to join a RJV is endogenous, we build a model of RJV participation. The ...

The Pricing Structure of Legal Services: Do Lawyers Offer What Clients Want?

We analyze clients’ contract choices in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for standard cases such as labor disputes for individuals and collecting debts for businesses. In the auctions, lawyers can submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer, including an hourly rate, a fixed fee, and a ‘mixed fee’: a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for any additional hours should the case take ...

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 blockholdings in different banks, maintaining fairly stable “common ownership” networks throughout our sample. However, the financial crisis led to capital injections ...

A Retrospective Evaluation of the GDF/Suez Merger: Effects on the Belgian Gas Hub

We present an ex-post analysis of the effects of GDF's acquisition of Suez in 2006, which created one of the world's largest energy companies. We perform a series of econometric analyses on the market for trading at the Zeebrugge gas hub in Belgium. Removing barriers to entry and facilitating access to the hub through ownership unbundling were an important part of the objectives of the remedies imposed ...

Transformational Strategies and Productivity Growth: A Transformational‐Activities Perspective on Stagnation in the New‐Normal Business Landscape

Declines in productivity growth substantially explain new‐normal business stagnation; yet in order to address situations of slack productivity growth, firms can choose from six generic transformational strategies: retirement, renewal, retrenchment, replication, redeployment, and recombination. While the extant literature focuses on specific transformational strategies that particular firms, ...

The Impact of Competition Policy Enforcement on the Functioning of EU Energy Markets

We investigate the impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of European energy markets while accounting for sectoral regulation. For this purpose, we compile a novel dataset on the European Commission's (EC) and EU member states' competition policy decisions in energy markets and combine it with firm- and sector-level data. We find that EC merger policy has a positive and robust ...

Effective European Antitrust: Does EC Merger Policy Generate Deterrence?

We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990–2009 period. Our empirical results suggest phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as—unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions—phase-1 remedies lead to fewer merger notifications in subsequent years. Furthermore, the deterrence effects of phase-1 remedies work best ...

Collusion through Joint R&D: An Empirical Assessment

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We show that a sufficient condition for identifying collusive behavior is a decline in the market share of RJV-participating firms. Using information from the U.S. National Cooperation Research Act, we estimate a market share equation correcting for the endogeneity of RJV participation and R&D expenditures. We find robust ...