Merger Control: More Stringent in Europe than in the United States?
8 Pages Posted: 8 Jan 2007
Date Written: November 2006
Abstract
Is the European Commission more interventionist or stringent than the US competition authorities? In the area of merger control, the gut reaction is "yes". At the forefront of everyone's mind is the European Commission's prohibition of General Electric's buyout of Honeywell in 2001. The ban sparked a major controversy in the United States. However, a statistical analysis of the 74 other merger and acquisition cases examined both by the European Commission and the US competition authorities prove this intuition wrong. What if the more stringent of the two is not who we think?
Keywords: mergers, competition policy, remedies
JEL Classification: L4, K21
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation