Abstract
This paper provides a survey of European antitrust law enforcement since its foundation in the Treaty of Rome of 1957 up to and including 2004. We present a complete overview and statistical analysis of all 538 formal Commission decisions under Articles 81, 82, and 86 of the European Community Treaty. We report a range of summary statistics concerning report route, investigation duration, length of the decision, decision type, imposed fines, number of parties, sector classification, nationality, and Commissioner and Director General responsible. The statistics are linked to changes in legislation and administrative implementation, thereby providing an historical overview that summarizes the Commission’s work in the area of antitrust. One or more appeals were filed with respect to 161 of the 538 decisions. We estimate the determinants of the size of the imposed fine and probability of appeal when an infringement has been found.
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We thank Joris Bijvoet, Norman Bremer, Corinne Dussart-Lefret, Francesco Russo, and Ida Wendt for their assistance in systematically collecting the data that underlie our analyses. Kati Cseres, Vivek Ghosal, John Kwoka, Bruce Lyons, Francesco Russo, Floris Vogelaar, Wouter Wils, the editor, and two referees provided useful comments. We also are indebted to participants at EARIE 2004 (Berlin), EARIE 2006 (Amsterdam), IIOC 2007 (Savannah), the 2007 PhD Workshop at the Center for Competition Policy (Norwich), and the 2008 ACLE conference “EC Competition Enforcement Data” (Amsterdam). Financial support from METEOR and ACLE is gratefully acknowledged. Opinions and errors remain ours.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Carree, M., Günster, A. & Schinkel, M.P. European Antitrust Policy 1957–2004: An Analysis of Commission Decisions. Rev Ind Organ 36, 97–131 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11151-010-9237-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11151-010-9237-9