Survey_CHO_2007

Abstract

We use an event study approach to analyze the effects of the introduction and strengthening of competition control (henceforth, “changes” in competition control) in numerous industrial countries over the last three decades. In order to identify the events, we collect detailed information on the legislative changes affecting the setup for competition reviews of M&As in the European Union (EU) and 18 individual countries: the United States and Canada, 14 EU countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, and two non-EU countries, Switzerland and Norway. We focus on the time period January 1, 1987 to July 1, 2004 during which most of the changes occurred. In the collection of the data, we relied on multiple sources. In a first step, we obtained and analyzed the exact text of all relevant legislation and regulation to identify the legal arrangements of the competition control in each country and the changes that took place over time. In a second step, we scrutinized the many publicly available reports on merger control to check our interpretation of the events (Appendix 1 contains a comprehensive list). Finally, we directly contacted experts of the various institutions dealing with merger control across all countries (Appendix 2 contains the list of agencies we contacted). We engaged these contacts, often in multiple and prolonged written and verbal communications, to confirm our understanding and “coding” of the data, to seek clarifications and corrections and to identify the most important aspects of merger control in practice.