Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
Getting Merger Guidelines Right, Keith N. Hylton
Getting Merger Guidelines Right, Keith N. Hylton
Faculty Scholarship
This paper is on the new Merger Guidelines. It makes several arguments. First, that the Guidelines should be understood as existing in a political equilibrium. Second, that the new structural presumption of the Merger Guidelines (HHI = 1,800) is too strict, and that an economically reasonable revision in the structural presumption would have increased rather than decreased the threshold. Whereas the new Guidelines lowers the threshold to HHI 1,800 from HHI 2,500, an economically reasonable revision would have increased the threshold to HHI 3,200. I justify this argument using a bare-bones model of Cournot competition. Third, it seems unlikely, …
Were The 1982 Merger Guidelines Old News?, Alan J. Meese, Sarah L. Stafford
Were The 1982 Merger Guidelines Old News?, Alan J. Meese, Sarah L. Stafford
Faculty Publications
This paper examines the impact of the 1982 Department of Justice Merger Guidelines on the stock market prices of publicly traded firms in the United States. We argue that those Guidelines were perceived by the market as a real change in enforcement policy that would result in substantial deregulation of mergers throughout the economy. We conduct an event study of S&P 500 firms to test this hypothesis and find evidence of a significant positive effect on the stock prices of firms in moderately concentrated industries subject to antitrust regulation, the firms for which the 1982 Guidelines articulate a substantially less …