The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law

Authors

Anu Bradford, Columbia Law SchoolFollow
Adam S. Chilton, University of Chicago Law SchoolFollow
Katerina Linos, University of California, BerkeleyFollow
Alex Weaver, LinklatersFollow

Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

The world’s biggest consumer markets – the European Union and the United States – have adopted different approaches to regulating competition. This has not only put the EU and US at odds in high-profile investigations of anticompetitive conduct, but also made them race to spread their regulatory models. Using a novel dataset of competition statutes, we investigate this race to influence the world’s regulatory landscape and find that the EU’s competition laws have been more widely emulated than the US’s competition laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the EU’s competition regime: the EU actively promotes its model through preferential trade agreements and has an administrative template that is easy to emulate. As EU and US regulators offer competing regulatory models in domains as diverse as privacy, finance, and environmental protection, our study sheds light on how global regulatory races are fought and won.

Disciplines

Antitrust and Trade Regulation | Comparative and Foreign Law | European Law | Law

Recommended Citation

Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Katerina Linos & Alex Weaver, The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Vol. 16, p. 731, 2019 (2019).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2513