Collaborative Research: The Law and Politics of Antitrust in Open Economies

合作研究：开放经济中反垄断的法律和政治

• 批准号: 1228453
• 负责人: Anu Bradford
• 金额: $ 10万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-15 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1228453&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Law; Politics; Antitrust

Antitrust law prohibits cartels and other anti-competitive practices in order to safeguard consumer interests and promote market efficiency and innovation. Legal doctrines, theoretical models, and empirical analyses of antitrust traditionally assume "closed" economies, where the boundaries of the market and the nation state coincide. Yet today, foreign firms often compete in U.S. markets, and exports are increasingly important for U.S. firms. This project offers a new understanding of antitrust in open economies and gathers extensive new data on antitrust laws and enforcement to allow systematic analyses of the relationship between trade and antitrust.Two decades ago, less than forty countries had antitrust laws. Today, more than one hundred thirty countries do. Strikingly, this rapid proliferation of antitrust laws has coincided with substantial liberalization of international trade, even though trade openness has conventionally been thought to reduce the need for antitrust by increasing market competition. This raises the concern whether governments are enacting and enforcing antitrust laws with a protectionist bias against foreign producers. Alternatively, trade openness may require more vigorous enforcement and lead to increased international enforcement cooperation, because open trade creates greater opportunities and incentives for international antitrust violations. This project examines the trade-antitrust relationship theoretically, as well as empirically by collecting new data on antitrust laws and enforcement (at the industry level over several decades in the United States and in the aggregate for numerous other countries). It thus provides a stronger theoretical and empirical foundation for the important policy debate over an international antitrust regime. More broadly, it will improve our understanding of how law mediates the relationship between politics and economics, elucidate the effects of delegating authority to expert bodies in a crucial issue area, and advance our understanding of the political and policy consequences of economic globalization.The project will also train graduate students and law students in methods of social science research. In addition, it will create a database that will be useful to other scholars interested in trade and antitrust, a pressing public economic issue.

反托拉斯法禁止卡特尔和其他反竞争做法，以保障消费者利益，促进市场效率和创新。 反托拉斯的法律的学说、理论模型和实证分析传统上假定“封闭”经济，即市场和民族国家的边界重合。 然而今天，外国公司经常在美国市场上竞争，出口对美国公司越来越重要。 该项目提供了对开放经济体中反垄断的新理解，并收集了有关反垄断法和执法的广泛新数据，以便系统地分析贸易与反垄断之间的关系。20年前，只有不到40个国家制定了反垄断法。 今天，有130多个国家这样做。 引人注目的是，反托拉斯法的迅速扩散与国际贸易的大幅度自由化同时发生，尽管贸易开放通常被认为会增加市场竞争，从而减少反托拉斯的必要性。 这引起了人们的关注，即政府是否在制定和执行反垄断法时对外国生产商存在保护主义偏见。 另外，贸易开放可能需要更有力的执法，并导致加强国际执法合作，因为开放的贸易为国际反托拉斯违法行为创造了更多的机会和刺激因素。该项目从理论上研究贸易与反垄断的关系，并通过收集有关反垄断法和执法的新数据（美国几十年来的行业水平和许多其他国家的总体数据）进行实证研究。 因此，它为关于国际反托拉斯制度的重要政策辩论提供了更有力的理论和经验基础。 从更广泛的意义上说，它将提高我们对法律如何调解政治和经济之间关系的理解，阐明在关键问题领域将权力下放给专家机构的效果，并提高我们对经济全球化的政治和政策后果的理解。该项目还将培养研究生和法学院学生的社会科学研究方法。 此外，它还将建立一个数据库，对其他对贸易和反托拉斯感兴趣的学者有用，这是一个紧迫的公共经济问题。