Did Antitrust Policy Cause the Great Merger Wave?
Did Antitrust Policy Cause the Great Merger Wave?
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DOI：
10.1086/467076
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发表时间：
1985-04
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
G. Bittlingmayer
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
G. Bittlingmayer
1898 年至 1902 年间，美国大约有一半的制造能力参与了合并。这些合并经常包括一个行业中的大多数公司，并且经常涉及那些一直固定价格或通过工业信托法律机制联合运营的公司。标准石油公司和美国钢铁公司的历史提供了众所周知的例子，在这些例子中，合并是在组织形式更为松散的情况下进行的，后来被称为“合并大浪潮”。是什么原因导致产业结构发生如此快速的变化呢？ 《谢尔曼反托拉斯法》于 1890 年通过，第一个决定价格操纵非法的关键决策——跨密苏里州 (1897)、联合交通 (1898) 和阿迪斯顿 (1899)——发生在合并浪潮第一阶段之前或期间。直到 1904 年，竞争公司的合并一直没有受到挑战。尽管反垄断政策引发了合并大浪潮似乎似乎是合理的，但这个问题从未被深入研究过，而且一些关于合并和早期反垄断政策的有影响力的研究淡化了两者之间存在联系的可能性。这令人费解，因为寻找替代方案尚未取得成果。经济学家可能的原因之一是
PERHAPS as much as one-half of U.S. manufacturing capacity took part in mergers during the years 1898 to 1902. These mergers frequently included most of the firms in an industry and often involved firms that had been fixing prices or that had been operated jointly through the legal mechanism of an industrial trust. The histories of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel provide well-known instances in which merger followed looser forms of organization in what has come to be known as the Great Merger Wave. What caused this rapid change of industry structure? The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, and the first crucial decisions making price fixing illegal-Trans-Missouri (1897), Joint Traffic (1898), and Addyston (1899)-occurred just before or during the first stages of the merger wave.' Merger of competing firms remained unchallenged until 1904. Although it certainly seems plausible that antitrust policy caused the Great Merger Wave, the question has never been looked into at length, and some influential studies of the mergers and of early antitrust policy play down the possibility of a connection. This is puzzling because the search for alternatives has not borne fruit. One reason economists may be