EU Merger Reform Leaves Key Gaps, Economists Warn

The researchers point to the importance of assessing future cost and demand conditions – when tariffs or supply-chain disruptions increase the costs for European firms, for example, or when AI-driven productivity gains lower their costs. The draft guidelines, as written, do not address how to include such shifts in a merger assessment. The details are published by the EPoS Economic Research Center at the Universities of Bonn and Mannheim in the discussion paper “Merger Control Amid Market Evolutions and Shocks: What the EU Merger Guidelines Should Say” and the theory paper “Merger Control in a Changing World”. Both are authored by Volker Nocke, Martin Peitz, and Nicolas Schutz, EPoS Economic Research Center.

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