Centre for Development Economics
Department of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR
Merger Guidelines in Polluting Industries: When Do They Matter?
by
Kiriti Kanjilal
(IIIT Delhi))
(Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 3:30 PM IST )
Venue: Amex Room
Abstract:-
We study mergers in polluting industries where a public firm is present. We evaluate how merger approvals are affected when the competition authority’s guidelines start considering environmental criteria. As expected, we show that more mergers are approved, yielding less pollution, and higher welfare. However, we find that firms only have incentives to submit a merger request if the public firm is mostly privatized; otherwise, no merger requests are filed in equilibrium, rendering guidelines changes inconsequential. We, then, examine how merger approvals are affected by the presence of the public firm and pollution. We also conduct robustness checks allowing that the manager of the public firm ignores emissions, the merger yields cost-reducing effects, and convex production costs.