The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law

The world’s biggest consumer markets – the European Union and the United States – have adopted different approaches to regulating competition. This has not only put the EU and US at odds in high-profile investigations of anticompetitive conduct, but also made them race to spread their regulatory models. Using a novel dataset of competition statutes, we investigate this race to influence the world’s regulatory landscape and find that the EU’s competition laws have been more widely emulated than the US’s competition laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the EU’s competition regime: the EU actively promotes its model through preferential trade agreements and has an administrative template that is easy to emulate. As EU and US regulators offer competing regulatory models in domains as diverse as privacy, finance, and environmental protection, our study sheds light on how global regulatory races are fought and won

Reshaping order execution in the EU and the role of interest groups under MiFID II

The controversial and long-awaited Commission Proposals to revise the cornerstone Markets in Financial Instruments Directive 2004 (MiFID I) were presented in October 2011. The Proposals are currently going through the Council and Parliament negotiation process, and final agreement is expected sometime in 2013. This article places these important reforms (together, MiFID II) in context by examining the impact of MiFID I since its application to EU financial markets in November 2007, and by considering what MiFID I's impact suggests for the design of MiFID II. It considers how MiFID I reshaped the EU share trading marketplace and how the dominant interests which shaped MiFID I's regulatory design fared. It also examines how those interest groups are seeking to shape MiFID II, and the implications. It suggests that the influence of interest groups may have led to overly ambitious MiFID II Proposals which are excessively concerned with investment firm and trading platform interests, and not sufficiently focused on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of EU share trading markets. It calls for a more modest approach to reform, based on fine-tuning MiFID I