Search Results
Journal Article
Agencies explain screening of bank acquisitions
Conference Paper
Should merger policy be changed? An antitrust perspective
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 ...
Journal Article
Has antitrust policy in banking become obsolete?
The authors analyze the effect of bank mergers on deposit interest rates, using data on banks responding to the Federal Reserve's Monthly Survey of Selected Deposits over an 11-year period. Their results suggest that banks exercise market power in pricing money market deposits and CD's in their local markets.
Journal Article
Anatomy of a price-fix
An analysis of a price-fixing scheme among retail food chains in the Cleveland, Ohio area that resulted in criminal charges and a $4.2 million fine against the perpetrators, plus a discussion of consumer damages involved in the case.
Journal Article
Banking antitrust in transition
Journal Article
Assessing bank antitrust standards
Working Paper
Market definition and the analysis of antitrust in banking
In antitrust analysis of bank mergers, banking markets are viewed as geographically local, with a "cluster" of products as the relevant product line. This view is criticized as outdated, now that many bank products are offered by nonbank institutions and financial institutions' operations are increasingly national in scope. This paper reexamines the question of market definition in banking, using two micro data sets uniquely well-suited to the task. We find that local depositories remain the dominant supplier of key financial services to households and small businesses, with geographic ...
Working Paper
Divestiture as an antitrust remedy in bank mergers
The purpose of this study is to determine whether, from a public policy standpoint, divestitures constitute an effective antitrust remedy in bank merger cases. A number of findings emerge from the study: Divested branches have a remarkable survival record; structural changes effected by divestitures tend to persist over time; larger buyers of divested branches tended to be more successful than smaller buyers; divestiture of the target institutions' branches rather than those of applicants proved preferable from an antitrust standpoint; and divested branches selected by the Department of ...
Journal Article
Bank merger policy and the new CRA data
Data now being collected under the Community Reinvestment Act can be used to examine several issues related to analyses of the competitive effects of proposed bank mergers and bank holding company acquisitions. This article looks at two of those issues: whether locally based commercial banks and savings institutions face significant competition in small business lending from institutions based outside local banking markets, and whether measured levels of market concentration differ significantly when calculated on the basis of small business loan originations rather than bank deposits, as has ...