The Deterrent Effect of UK Competition Enforcement

Summary  The paper briefly reviews previous studies of the deterrent effect of competition enforcement. It then describes the key findings of a recent report commissioned by the Office of Fair Trading on the scale of the deterrent effect of merger control and competition law enforcement in the UK. The research, which was based on in-depth interviews and phone surveys with senior competition lawyers and large UK companies also indicated which sanctions may be more effective at deterring anti-competitive behaviour and provided suggestions for improving deterrence. The paper discusses a number of policy issues raised by the research’s findings. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the OFT or Deloitte. This paper was prepared for the October 2007 workshop on Measuring the Effects of Competition Law Enforcement, organized by the Netherlands Competition Authority.     

Ex-Post Evaluation of Competition Law Enforcement Effects in the German Packaging Waste Compliance Scheme Market

We provide an ex-post evaluation of the impact of competition law enforcement activities in the German packaging waste compliance scheme market. Until 2003, the non-profit compliance scheme DSD enjoyed a monopoly in the market. Numerous antitrust cases, however, paved the way for competitive market structures. We show that these enforcement activities resulted in a series of market entries since 2004, a corresponding drop in DSD’s market share, increased innovation and substantial efficiencies. Furthermore, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to show that prices decreased by 63% and to estimate the aggregated consumer welfare gains achieved by 2011 at a total of €13 billion. In the given case imposing a non-profit obligation on the monopolist did not substitute for the efficiency-enhancing effects of competition.     

The Economic Effect Of Competition Law Enforcement: The Case Of The Netherlands

Summary  In this paper we try to bridge the gap between the outcome ambitions of competition policy in terms of welfare gains and consumer surplus and the longer term effects of competition policy on growth and employment. First of all, an overview is given of the different definitions of welfare. We explain why maximising the consumer surplus is an important part of the mission statement for most competition authorities. In the second part of the paper we estimate the impact of the introduction of the competition law on economic development. The effects of antitrust policies, merger control and energy regulation on the consumer surplus appear substantial. This increase in consumer surplus can be interpreted as a cut in the “market power wedge” which, from a modelling point of view, is comparable to a cut in the tax wedge. A model simulation for the Netherlands shows that the economy responded positively to this increase in the consumer surplus. We find that production has grown by an extra 0.5% and that employment has increased by 0.4% as a result of the enforcement of the Competition Law. The authors are respectively Chief Economist of the NMa and senior advisor at the Office of the Chief Economist of the NMa. This paper is the background paper for the presentation with the same title at the conference “Measuring the Economic Effects of Competition Law Enforcement”, held in The Hague, 17 and 18 October 2007. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.     

Competition Policy: What are the Costs and Benefits of Measuring its Costs and Benefits?

Summary  Competition authorities are increasingly measuring the effects of their enforcement actions, seeking a robust justification for the proliferation of competition policy. We highlight the importance of identifying the right counterfactual against which to measure effects, and set out the relevant categories of costs and benefits. We then explore how a balance can be struck between the benefits and inherent limitations of these measurement exercises. Relatively crude analyses of cartel action benefits can be sufficient to achieve public legitimacy for competition policy. Assessing the effects of merger and conduct inquiries is often ambiguous, but could be used to improve decision-making processes. Director and Managing Consultant, respectively, at Oxera, Oxford and London. The valuable comments of Fod Barnes, Kerry Hughes and an anonymous referee are gratefully acknowledged. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors alone.     

Competition Policy in the Asian-Pacific Region

This paper surveys competition policy in the APEC countries. It covers competition-promoting policies such as free trade but focuses on competition law. Fourteen of the 21 APEC countries have comprehensive national competition laws but in some the coverage is limited and the enforcement is weak. After reviewing national, bilateral and regional competition laws, the paper discusses the problems of devising competition law in developing countries with a weak tradition of promoting competition.     

Bank risk taking,efficiency, and law enforcement: Evidence from Chinese city commercial banks

We investigate bank risk taking, efficiency and their relation to law enforcement using a unique sample of 133 Chinese city commercial banks across 31 regions for the 1999–2008 period. We find that stronger law enforcement tends to promote greater bank risk taking in the region. Furthermore, employing a stochastic distance function approach, our analysis shows that the performance of Chinese city commercial banks, as measured by bank efficiency, is heavily influenced by the effectiveness of law enforcement in the region. Better legal environment, higher efficiency in the legal system, and stronger protection of intellectual property right are associated with a higher level of efficiency among these banks.     

Institutional choice in the governance of the early Atlantic sugar trade: diasporas,markets, and courts

The expanding sugar trade linking Portugal, Brazil, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries required enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that overseas agents would act honestly and diligently. While the recent literature emphasizes that multiple mechanisms were substitutes in addressing this problem, this article highlights that merchants chose different mechanisms to govern distinct types of transactions and explains why. A reputational mechanism relying on social and economic constraints within an ethnic diaspora governed more complex and higher‐value arrangements. A different mechanism linking economic incentives to professional reputations across the diasporas plying this trade route predominated in simpler and smaller transactions. Finally, long‐distance and transnational judicial enforcement supplemented these two reputational mechanisms. Capable of matching the value and complexity of transactions with the attributes of governing mechanisms, merchants were able to diversify their transactions, expand the market for agents, better allocate agents to tasks, and stimulate competition among them. The resulting decrease in agency costs was critical in such a significantly competitive market as the sugar trade. Evolving institutional choice thus reinforced the expansion of trade. These hypotheses are corroborated by data from a prosopography of merchants of Jewish origin, derived from notarial records from Oporto and Amsterdam, and from Inquisition files.     

Competition Law as a Constraint on Monopolistic Exploitation by Sports Leagues and Clubs

The sports industry is characterized by dominant leagues andclubs exercising economic power unconstrained by rivals or thethreat of entry, often featuring market-division schemes. Leaguesand clubs can raise price, lower output, and lower quality tofans, create an artificial scarcity of top-tier teams resultingin publicly subsidized stadiums, and impose labour-market restraintsthat significantly harm consumers by misallocating players,most obviously by inhibiting low-quality teams' quick improvement.Business decisions made by club-run leagues feature significanttransaction costs, resulting in even greater inefficiency thanwould occur if leagues were controlled by a single entity. Manycountries have employed settled principles of competition law,originating in the common law of restraint of trade, as a usefuland meaningful constraint on the abuses of economic power insports. Courts have prohibited agreements between clubs or leaguesthat distort prices or output, or render output unresponsiveto consumer demand, unless the agreement is shown to be demonstrablynecessary to achieve a pro-competitive goal. In this paper,I argue that consumers and sports fans will benefit from a moreambitious enforcement of these established principles of competitionlaw.     

秩序、效率和正义——瓦格纳法立法价值的历史考察

立法本质上就是不同价值的博弈、权衡和选择的过程。法律作为价值载体,体现着不同的价值理念、不同的价值期望以及相应权利义务的分配,并左右着立法过程和法律的实施。1935年,在瓦格纳法的立法过程中,美国工会、企业界和政府三种力量的不同立法价值之间的博弈,造就了美国劳资关系法律制度变革,其中有三个重要的制度性突破:一是初步构建了劳资之间在组织力量对抗上的大致均衡;二是劳资集体谈判的合法有序;三是在工会组织内部实现工会的多元化竞争。这些劳资法律制度的创新实现了对秩序、效率和正义实现的不同诉求。     

城镇化过程中农民土地权益保护研究

在我国城镇化的过程中,还存在一些地方政府以公共利益为由,低价征用农民的土地;以情况特殊为由,违规征用土地用于非农建设;以集中土地招商的形式,强迫农民土地集中流转;土地出让金及税费高,农民分享土地增值收益难等侵害农民土地权益的问题。为了切实维护农民土地权益,需要适时修改土地管理相关的法律,加快农民土地权益保护立法;规范行政执法行为,增加违法成本;确立以市场价值作为征地补偿的依据,提高征地补偿标准;加快土地确权,明确农民土地产权;加强土地督察工作,完善土地执法监察体系;建立健全社会保障体系,做好失地农民的安置工作;加强宣传教育及普法工作,提高农民依法维护土地权益的意识。     

欧盟竞争法豁免制度及对我国的启示

竞争法豁免制度可以平衡竞争政策与经济政策、社会政策之间的冲突,有助于实现竞争法的多重价值目标。以基础性条约、欧盟理事会的条例、欧洲委员会的通知、指导建议及欧洲法院判例为渊源,以个案豁免和类别豁免为内容,欧盟的竞争法已建立起完备的豁免制度。我国反垄断法豁免制度的构建既要借鉴"他山之石"又要立足于"本土资源"。在制度设计上至少应思考并解决三个问题:豁免制度具体应包含哪些类型的豁免?豁免制度的适用采用审查确认制度还是直接适用制度?豁免制度立法采具体列举式还是原则概括式?     

Corporate Political Connections and Tax Aggressiveness

This study investigates the relation between corporate political connections and tax aggressiveness. We study a broad array of corporate political activities, including the employment of connected directors, campaign contributions, and lobbying. Using a large hand‐collected data set of U.S. firms' political connections, we find that politically connected firms are more tax aggressive than nonconnected firms, after controlling for other determinants of tax aggressiveness, industry and year fixed effects, and the endogenous choice of being politically connected. Our findings are robust to various measures of political connections and tax aggressiveness. These results are consistent with the conjecture that politically connected firms are more tax aggressive because of their lower expected cost of tax enforcement, better information regarding tax law and enforcement changes, lower capital market pressure for transparency, and greater risk‐taking tendencies induced by political connections.     

Assessing the Effects of Antitrust Enforcement in the United States

Summary  This article reviews empirical evidence informing an assessment of cartel and merger antitrust enforcement in the United States and makes some reasonable inferences from it. It also explains why an objective assessment based on hard evidence is not possible for the critical deterrence effects of enforcement, or for any of the effects of enforcement against single-competitor exclusionary conduct. Finally, this article describes the reporting by the U.S. Department of Justice of consumer savings from its antitrust enforcement actions, and details the construction of the savings estimates from cartel and horizontal merger enforcement. The views expressed herein are not purported to represent those of the U.S. Department of Justice.     

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? or Measuring and Evaluating the Effectiveness of Competition Enforcement

Summary  This article surveys, discusses and classifies methods for ex-post evaluation of the efficiency of competition authorities: court appeals, peer reviews, case studies, event studies, (authorities’ own) bottom-up calculations of consumer gains, deadweight-loss estimates, cross-country panel studies etc. Based on empirical estimates from other types of studies and on a simple oligopoly model, one conclusion is that many bottom-up calculations are based on exaggerated estimates of gains from cartel enforcement, relative to those from merger enforcement. Another conclusion is that authorities’ ex-post self evaluations are of limited value, relative to external evaluations. “Who watches the guardians?”, by Juvenal, 2nd century Roman poet and critic.     

浅议新反垄断法

《反垄断法》的出台平静了起草阶段的喧嚣,针对出台前争论的几个热点——行政垄断的规范、外资并购的适用以及反垄断执法机构的设计,《反垄断法》都给出了它最终的立法选择。本文将围绕着这三个问题简要评析我国新《反垄断法》的具体规定。     

习惯法调整民间金融的实践逻辑

温州一起民间金融个案表明,当地熟人社区中的民间金融合约关系主要依靠习惯法来调整。社区成员依照习惯法立约、履约,由此积累经济资源、拓展人际信任网络和获得社会合法性,违反者则会遭受来自习惯法的群体性强制和惩罚,基层政府不能完全依法调整民间金融活动,并有限默认了习惯法的存在。习惯法本身在实践过程中也经历了小农互助、商业营利、政治嵌入三类逻辑的演化更替。     

我国农村法治的缺失与建设

当前制约中国社会发展的根本问题是"三农"问题,"三农"问题的解决需要有良好的社会机制。法治作为现代社会控制的有效机制正在成为中国社会发展的战略选择,靠传统礼俗和政策为主要调节和运行手段的中国农村社会也最终要步入现代法治的轨道。彻底打破城乡二元体制,这是发展农村法治的体制前提;充分发掘传统法律文化和农村民间法资源,则是完善农村法治的重要路径;而积极培育农村市场经济主体,提高农民法律意识,将是完善农村法治的根本途径。     

浅谈城市综合执法之现状及对策

城市作为现代文明的标志,是经济,政治,文化等的中心。在经济全球化中,中国的城市管理面临严峻的考验,介于此,本文主要从执法的基本内涵,特征,及综合执法在现阶段存在的问题等方面做了一些粗浅的思考,并且针对存在的一些问题提出了几点建议,以期能对综合执法在现阶段的完善与发展有所帮助。     

从法律角度谈现行住房贷款的制度性缺陷

住房消费贷款的实施，为拉动内需、促进经济增长做出了贡献，但由于目前在住房贷款经营管理中还存在一些问题，因此，要加强住房贷款制度建设，改进相关措施以符合法律及国际惯例，防范可能发生的法律风险。     

对发展农民合作经济组织的几点思考

文章对农民合作经济组织发展过程中的一些问题进行了讨论，认为政府的制度推进与组织发展程度不相适应，政策的制定没有充分考虑农民的理性选择，农村社会传统文化在组织运行过程中起着重要作用，文化建设是组织制度建设的必要储备，并针对以上论点提出建议。