Thinking Competition - A few thoughts on the Draft Merger Guidelines

On this episode of Thinking Competition,  Gonçalo Machado Borges is joined by Jorge Padilla, Chair of Compass Lexecon and renowned antitrust and industrial organisation economist. The talk focused on the Commission’s new draft Merger Guidelines, recently the object of public consultation. We talked a bit about everything: Single Market fragmentation, lack of scale (and funding) of European firms, consolidation and productivity; how to weigh efficiencies against anticompetitive effects, in a context where merger-specific efficiencies are promoted to ‘theories of benefit’; whether, or not, it will become easier to buy start-ups and small innovative companies; and how to assess the impact of mergers on upstream labour markets.