Dear Readers, The June 2017 CPI Antitrust Chronicle was centered on the policy debates around Index Funds as a possible “New Antitrust Frontier.” Since then, an intense debate rages on over common ownership and possible competitive effects. We decided to revisit this topic and get a sense of how the debate is progressing. An important […]
…with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg – In this month’s edition of CPI Talks we have the pleasure of speaking with Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg. Judge Ginsburg is a Senior Judge serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Chairman of the International Board of Advisors of the Global Antitrust […]
By Menesh S. Patel – This article presents eight critical points that can aid the ongoing and early development of antitrust policy relating to common ownership. These points touch on some of the most salient issues concerning the relationship between common ownership and competitive harm and have important implications on how regulators should craft antitrust […]
By Daniel P. O’Brien – An intense policy debate rages over the competitive effects of common ownership. But the empirical work that sparked the debate is not well tethered to economic theory, and this has led to misconceptions about what the empirical work shows. The purpose of this paper is to take a step back […]
By Holly J. Gregory – This article considers the potential anticompetitive effects of common ownership by institutional investors in concentrated industries from a corporate governance perspective and questions the hypothesis that companies in concentrated industries are pressed by institutional investors into anti-competitive conduct. It concludes that restricting institutional investor investment and related governance engagement would […]
By Miguel Antón, José Azar, Mireia Giné & Luca X. Lin – Acquisitions are on average value-destroying for acquirer shareholders, while it has been shown that non-merging rivals generally gain after such “bad deals.” Value-destroying acquisitions have been largely attributed to managerial discretion, yet why do shareholders approve such decisions? This article illustrates that acquirer […]
By Anna Tzanaki – Is common ownership the Doomsday Machine for the operation of free markets, competition and capitalism as we know it? An observer of cutting-edge law and economics literature may indeed tend to believe that we are approaching a point of ultimate antitrust apocalypse. This article tries to unfold the ongoing antitrust-focused debate […]
By Martin Schmalz – A significant gap persists between the economic literature on common ownership and the legal and public-policy discussion of the associated antitrust problem. To illustrate this gap and ways to bridge it, this note offers examples of contributions to the debate that deviate from what is known in the literature. Contrary to […]
By Thomas A. Lambert & Michael E. Sykuta – Antitrust scholars have recently proposed additional interventions — beyond enforcement of traditional rules on hub-and-spoke conspiracies, collusion- facilitating devices, etc. — to police anticompetitive harms purportedly resulting from institutional investors’ common ownership of small stakes in competing firms. They maintain that the current “enforcement passivity” on […]
Dear Readers, The Healthcare Sector continues to be fertile ground for antitrust issues, whether in the case of hospital or pharmaceutical mergers (vertical, cross-market, etc.), pay for delay issues, patent settlements, or parallel exports, etc. CPI is pleased to present out latest Antitrust Chronicle focusing on some of these hotly discussed topics in the Healthcare […]