Search Results
Journal Article
Antitrust policy and vertical mergers
Recently, federal regulators responsible for enforcing the antitrust laws have shown a renewed interest in the potential anticompetitive effects of vertical mergers--mergers between two independent firms in successive stages of production. This greater activism in vertical merger cases is in striking contrast to the permissive policies that prevailed throughout the 1980s, which, in turn, were a response to the Justice Department's and the Federal Trade Commission's open hostility to vertical mergers during the 1960s and 1970s.> The cyclical antitrust treatment of vertical mergers over the ...
Working Paper
Empirical evidence on vertical foreclosure
Recent papers have shown conditions under which vertical, mergers can result in anticompetitive foreclosure of unintegrated rivals. These models imply that a necessary but not sufficient condition for anticompetitive foreclosure is that unintegrated rivals are less profitable after a vertical merger. We test this hypothesis by examining the stock prices of unintegrated rivals at the time of a vertical merger announcement and at the time of a government antitrust complaint. We find no evidence to support the foreclosure hypothesis.