We are using the Comparative Competition Law Datasets to develop new measures of competition law, study the diffusion of these laws, and to test their effects. Below you can find information on the papers that we have released so far.
Primary Research
Competition Law Around the World from 1889 to 2010: The Competition Law Index
Journal of Competition Law & Economics, 14(3): 393-432 (2018)
By Anu Bradford and Adam Chilton
[Journal] [SSRN]
Competition laws have become a mainstay of regulation in market economies. At the same time, past efforts to study the drivers or effects of competition laws have been hampered by the lack of systematic measures of these laws across a wide range of years or countries. In this paper, we draw on new data on the evolution of competition laws to create a novel Competition Law Index (the “CLI”) that measures the stringency of competition regulation from 1889 to 2010. We then employ the CLI to examine trends in the intensity of competition regulation over time and across key countries. We also use our data to create several alternative indexes of competition law that may be appropriate for specific research applications. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate how the CLI can facilitate new empirical research on comparative and international competition law.
Competition Gone Global: The Comparative Competition Law and Enforcement Datasets
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 16(2): 411-443 (2019)
By Anu Bradford, Adam Chilton, Christopher Megaw, and Nathaniel Sokol
[Journal] [SSRN]
Competition law has proliferated around the world. Due to data limitations, however, there is little systematic information about the substance and enforcement of these laws. In this paper, we address that problem by introducing two new datasets on competition law regimes around the world. First, we introduce the Comparative Competition Law Dataset, which codes competition laws in 130 jurisdictions between 1889 to 2010. Second, we introduce the Comparative Competition Enforcement Dataset, which provides data on competition agencies’ resources and activities in 100 jurisdictions between 1990 and 2010. These datasets offer the most comprehensive picture of competition law yet assembled and provide a new foundation for empirical research on the legal regimes used to regulate markets.
Trade Openness and Antitrust Law
Journal of Law and Economics, 62(1): 29-65 (2019)
By Anu Bradford and Adam Chilton
[Journal] [SSRN] [Replication Materials] [Supplementary Materials]
Openness to international trade and adoption of antitrust laws can both curb anticompetitive behavior. But scholars have long debated the relationship between the two. Some argue that greater trade openness makes antitrust unnecessary, while others contend that antitrust laws are still needed to realize the benefits of trade liberalization. Data limitations have made this debate largely theoretical to date. We study the relationship between trade and antitrust empirically using new data on antitrust laws and enforcement activities. We find that trade openness and stringency of antitrust laws are positively correlated from 1950 to 2010 overall, but the positive correlation disappears in the early 1990s as a large number of new countries adopt antitrust laws. However, we find a positive correlation between trade openness and antitrust enforcement resources and activities for both early and late adopters of antitrust regimes during this period.
The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 16(4): 731-766 (2019)
By Anu Bradford, Adam Chilton, Katerina Linos, and Alexander Weaver
[Journal] [SSRN] [Supplementary Materials]
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.
The Chicago School’s Limited Influence on International Antitrust
University of Chicago Law Review, 87(2): 297-329 (2020)
By Anu Bradford, Adam Chilton, and Filippo Maria Lancieri
[Journal] [SSRN]
Beginning in the 1950’s, a group of scholars primarily associated with the University of Chicago began to challenge many of the fundamental tenants of antitrust law. This movement—which became known as the Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis—profoundly altered the course of American antitrust scholarship, regulation, and enforcement. What is not known, however, is the degree to which Chicago School ideas influenced the antitrust regimes of other countries. By leveraging new datasets on antitrust laws and enforcement around the world, we empirically explore whether ideas embraced by the Chicago School diffused internationally. Our analysis illustrates that many ideas explicitly rejected by the Chicago School—like using antitrust law to promote goals beyond efficiency or regulate unilateral conduct —are common features of antitrust regimes in other countries. We also provide suggestive evidence that the influence of the antitrust revolution launched by the Chicago School has been more limited outside of the United States.
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?
Journal of Law and Economics, 64(2): 207-231 (2021)
By Anu Bradford, Yun-chien Chang, Adam Chilton, & Nuno Garoupa
[Journal] [SSRN] [Supplementary Materials]
There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly predicts whether countries have similar property regimes but does little to predict whether countries have similar antitrust regimes. Our results suggest that legal origin may be an important predictor of legal substance in well-established legal regimes but does little to explain substantive variation in more recent areas of law.
Regulating Antitrust Through Trade Agreements
Antitrust Law Journal, 84(1): 103-125 (2021)
By Anu Bradford and Adam Chilton
[Journal] [SSRN]
Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) often include provisions that stipulate how countries should regulate antitrust. However, the exact content of these provisions has not been comprehensively documented. This article introduces a new dataset that analyzes antitrust provisions in 596 PTAs and then uses it to explore aspects of the relationship between antitrust and trade agreements. First, we investigate how many PTAs in the dataset have provisions that directly address antitrust law. We find that roughly 51 percent of the PTAs have either a chapter or an article devoted to antitrust. Second, we document that while over 75 percent of these PTAs address antitrust issues related to dominance, cartels, and vertical agreements, only a small fraction (i.e., 9 percent) specifically address mergers. Third, we show that antitrust provisions are often enforceable, with 71 percent of PTAs containing antitrust provisions extending the PTA’s dispute settlement mechanism to those provisions. Fourth, our analysis shows that while non-discrimination of foreign companies in antitrust matters is sometimes addressed in the PTAs, it is more common for the parties to promote regulatory cooperation through PTAs. Finally, we document differences in how the European Union and the United States have used PTAs to export antitrust law around the world. We find not only that the European Union signed dramatically more PTAs with antitrust provisions than the United States, but also that 63 percent of PTAs with antitrust chapters or articles include language that is distinctive of EU laws. In contrast, only less than 1 percent of PTAs with antitrust chapters or articles include language that is distinctive of U.S. laws. This suggests that, unlike the United States, the European Union frequently deploys PTAs as a tool to export its antitrust laws.
Related Research
Is EU Merger Control used for Protectionism? An Empirical Analysis
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 15:165-191 (2018)
By Anu Bradford, Robert J. Jackson Jr., and Jonathan Zytnick
[Journal] [SSRN]
The European Commission has often used its merger‐review power to challenge high‐profile acquisitions involving non‐E.U. companies, giving rise to concerns that its competition authority has evolved into a powerful tool for industrial policy. The Commission has been accused of deliberately targeting foreign—especially U.S.—acquirers, while facilitating the creation of European national champions. These concerns, however, rest on a few famous anecdotes. In this article, we introduce a unique dataset that allows us to provide the first rigorous examination of these claims. Our analysis of the over 5,000 mergers reported to the Commission between 1990 and 2014 reveals no evidence that the Commission has systematically used its authority to protectionist ends. If anything, our results suggest that the Commission is less likely to challenge transactions involving non‐E.U. acquirers. Our analysis therefore challenges the common notion of European antitrust protectionism and shifts the burden of proof to those advancing this view.