"The Logic of Delegation: Explaining the Evolution of EU Merger Control"

Council Regulation 4064/89, otherwise known as the Merger Regulation, affected a significant transfer of authority from domestic competition authorities to the European Commission. Most analyses exploring the origins of this legislation focus on the negotiating dynamics among member governments in the Council of Ministers. This paper argues that, alone, such explanations are inadequate. They too often view legislative outcomes as an event, rather than an endpoint of a process. Instead, an adequate understanding of the Regulation must focus on the broad history of merger control and, in particular, the role played by the Commission. Specific attention is paid to the impact of the Commission’s dual-track effort to give merger control a Community dimension. The final section of the paper examines the administrative framework embedded within the Regulation. The paper argues that the relationship between member governments and the Commission can be usefully analyzed employing concepts and analytics borrowed from principal-agent theories

Managing State Aid in a Time of Crisis: Commission Crisis Communications and the Financial Sector Bailout

The September 2008 collapse of American investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered a global financial crisis whose effects were quickly felt in European banking. The scale of the crisis and the speed with which it propagated through the sector prompted governments to take aggressive action. In the months following the onset of the crisis, EU governments approved guarantee schemes, recapitalizations, and asset relief measures worth over €4.5 trillion. Such vast amounts of aid, necessary though it may have been, threatened to distort competitive conditions in the sector. To forestall this, the European Commission issued four ‘crisis communications’ in which authorities set out how member states could best support financial institutions whilst respecting EU competition rules and thus avoiding undue distortions of competition. We argue that these guidance documents, though only non-binding soft law, not only helped preserve competition in the banking sector but also provided a policy resource that Commission authorities have used to restructure the banking sector

Managing the Dilemma of Discretion: The European Commission and the Development of EU State Aid Policy

This article examines the role played by the European Commission in the development of the European Union\u27s (EU) state aid policy. It does so through the prism of a \u27dilemma\u27 that exists at the nexus of the Commission\u27s delegated authority to administer EU treaty state aid provisions, the discretion conferred on Commission authorities by the imprecise language in which those provisions are written, and the political and institutional control mechanisms EU member governments use to influence the exercise of that discretion. Examining Commission efforts to manage this dilemma over the history of the EU, we provide evidence to illustrate how the Commission\u27s approach adapted to shifting economic and political conditions