53 research outputs found
The New Political Economy of EU State Aid Policy
Despite its importance and singularity, the EU’s state aid policy has attracted less scholarly attention than other elements of EU competition policy. Introducing the themes addressed by the special issue, this article briefly reviews the development of EU policy and highlights why the control of state aid matters. The Commission’s response to the current economic crisis notably in banking and the car industry is a key concern, but the interests of the special issue go far beyond. They include: the role of the European Commission in the development of EU policy, the politics of state aid, and a clash between models of capitalism. The special issue also examines the impact of EU policy. It investigates how EU state aid decisions affect not only industrial policy at the national level (and therefore at the EU level), but the welfare state and territorial relations within federal member states, the external implications of EU action and the strategies pursued by the Commission to limit any potential disadvantage to European firms, and the conflict between the EU’s expanding legal order and national
Estimating damages from price-fixing: the value of transaction data
We use a unique private data set of about 340,000 invoice positions from 36 smaller and
larger customers of German cement producers to study the value of such transaction data for
an estimation of cartel damages. In particular, we investigate, first, how structural break
analysis can be used to identify the exact end of the cartel agreement and, second, how an
application of before-and-after approaches to estimate the price overcharge can benefit from
such rich data sets. We conclude that transaction data allows such a detailed assessment of the
cartel and its impact on direct customers that its regular application in private antitrust cases is
desired as long as data collection and preparation procedures are not prohibitively expensive
The Discontent Cartel Member and Cartel Collapse: The Case of the German Cement Cartel
Effectiveness of bailouts in the EU
Governments in the EU frequently bail out firms in distress by granting state aid. I use data from 86 cases during the years 1995-2003 to examine two issues: the effectiveness of bailouts in preventing bankruptcy and the determinants of bailout policy. The results are threefold. First, the estimated discrete-time hazard rate increases during the first four years after the subsidy and drops after that, suggesting that some bailouts only delayed exit instead of preventing it. The number of failing bailouts could be reduced if European control was tougher. Second, governments’ bailout decisions favored state-owned firms, even though state-owned firms did not outperform private ones in the survival chances. Third, subsidy choice is an endogenous variable in the analysis of the hazard rate. Treating it as exogenous underestimates its impact on the bankruptcy probability. Several policy implications of the results are discussed in the paper
From Negative to Positive Integration: European State Aid Control Through Soft and Hard Law
Die Rachenflora bei mit Penicillin behandeltem Scharlach, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Frage der generellen Therapie des Scharlachs mit Penicillin
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