Working Paper
Are there regimes of antitrust enforcement? An empirical analysis
Holliday, Andrew J.; Hopper, Gregory P. (1996)
In this paper, the authors propose a new index of antitrust enforcement. The index is compiled from quarterly data from the Department of Justice from 1890 to 1989 and is designed to reflect the relative influence of variables that have deterrent effects. The authors use Hamilton's (1989, 1990) regime-switching technique to estimate a model in which the enforcement index follows a regime-specific AR(1) process. The authors find evidence of long-lived regimes. The high enforcement regime, which lasted from about 1910 to the mid-1960s, produced enforcement that was, on average, almost twice as ...
Working Papers , Paper 96-21