Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog

Fellowship to Research Competition Issues in New Zealand for Academics

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

New Zealand is one of the world’s most open economies and has among the fewest regulatory barriers of any country.  Because of New Zealand's trade dynamism and the small size of its economy (with some highly concentrated industries as a result), there are a number of interesting antitrust/competition policy related issues in the New Zealand context.

The New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation (ISCR) invites applications from academics for the S T Lee Research Fellowship. ISCR’s research is undertaken by a specially created academic unit based at Victoria University of Wellington’s Rutherford House campus in downtown Wellington, New Zealand.  Spending three months in New Zealand should be a dream both in terms of exploring a beautiful country and opportunities for great research and collaboration with some of the country’s top competition experts.

In looking for materials to use in my comparative and international antitrust law and economics seminar, I recently had a chance to email with one of New Zealand's top competition practitioners, Peter Hinton.  Peter heads the competition practice at Simpson Grierson.  I gather from Peter that there are a number of interesting cases and industries worthy of study (not so subtle hint to my students looking for topics for their research papers).

DOJ and FTC: A Poor Partnership?

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

Professor Kovacic has some sharp words about the need for greater cooperation between the DoJ and FTC, with an equally insightful response from Professor Pitofsky at

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200701291348DOWJONESDJONLINE000538_FORTUNE5.htm

U.S. Antitrust Economics Scholarship

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

This spring I am teaching a comparative and international antitrust law and economics seminar with my colleague and co-author Kyle Stiegert in our Applied Economics department.  The class has an eclectic mix of students.  Some are economics PhD students, others are JD and LLM students. Students have different levels of classroom and practical background in antitrust law and/or economics. Kyle and I have found that it is helpful to have both lawyers and economists in the same class to tease out different perspectives, presumptions and approaches for issues that both disciplines grapple to understand. We hope that this class will aid students to create effective policy solutions since outside the classroom lawyers and economists must interface regularly on antitrust. So far, the mix of backgrounds and approaches (we also have a former Taiwanese FTC lawyer in the class) has made for excellent classroom discussion. In trying to find a nice background literature review on U.S. antitrust for the class, I came across a new NBER working paper, entitled "Antitrust" by Louis Kaplow and Carl Shapiro that surveys the economics underlying antitrust.

ABSTRACT: This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of current economic knowledge and use that knowledge to critically assess central features of antitrust policy. Our objective is to foster the improvement of legal regimes and also to identify topics where further analytical and empirical exploration would be useful.

Budzinski on An International Multilevel Competition Policy System

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Issues of antitrust institutional choice are critical in an increasingly global environment in which conduct has effects across a number of different jurisdictions.  This is an issue of particular importance to me and I have a forthcoming working paper (up next month on SSRN) on this issue.  Oliver Budzinski of the University of Marburg has published a working paper entitled "An International Multilevel Competition Policy System" that attempts to address the global gap in antitrust enforcement.

ABSTRACT: This paper develops a proposal for an international multilevel competition policy system, which draws on the insights of the analysis of multilevel systems of institutions. In doing so, it targets to contribute to bridge a gap in the current world economic order, i.e. the supranational governance of private international restrictions to market competition. Such a governance can effectively be designed against the background of a combination of the well-known nondiscrimination principle and a lead jurisdiction model. Put very briefly, competition policy on the global level restricts itself to the selection and appointment of appropriate lead jurisdictions for concrete cross-border antitrust cases, while the substantive treatment remains within the competence of the existing national and regional-supranational antitrust regimes.

Deadline for Steiger Fellowship is this Friday, February 2

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

http://www.abanet.org/antitrust/at-law-student/at-js-project.shtml