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Horizontal mergers that raise competition concerns may require divestitures that eliminate the identified concerns. At the same time, divestitures should be proportionate, not going above and beyond what is necessary to eliminate the identified concerns. In this article, we argue that in differentiated product markets out-of-market substitutes exert stronger competitive pressure on some products within the relevant product market than on others. As a result, a divestiture of products that are subject to strong competitive pressure from out-of-market substitutes may not be needed if other products that are subject to weaker competitive pressure are divested. A simplistic solution that requires divestitures in all areas of horizontal overlap could result in overly broad remedies that violate the proportionality principle.

• When a supplier has multiple uses for its product, its sales-based share in a market may provide more useful first indications of its market power in that market than its production- or capacity-based share. • In particular, the small sales share of a supplier in a market suggests that its effective incremental cost of serving that market, which is the cost of foregoing the best alternative use for its product, is large and its market power in that market is small, irrespective of the size of its overall production or capacity. • When the products that are manufactured with the internally sourced input are in direct competition in the downstream market with the products that are manufactured by the upstream market’s customers, internal sales of the upstream product may constitute, by increasing demand elasticity in the upstream market, an indirect competitive constraint on it. • If the elimination of double marginalisation creates the incentive for the merged entity to expand production, a capacity constraint upstream may be reached, giving rise to effects that, being neither horizontal nor vertical in nature, we consider non-traditional.

The Regional Aid Guidelines foresee specific screens for an in-depth assessment of Large Investment Projects (LIPs): an in-depth assessment is initiated if the market share of the aid beneficiary is above 25% or the investment results in a capacity expansion above 5% in a declining market. It is currently being discussed within the broader State Aid Modernization package and also due to a recent court ruling on the case Propapier whether these market screens should stay as they are. Based on a dataset of all LIP cases notified under the 2006 Regional Aid Guidelines, we evaluate those market screens and find that the screens do have power to identify problematic cases – cases with a below average expected aid effectiveness and aid measures targeting specific industries. We also find, however, that the market screens are affected by a severe implementation problem and, hence, do not help to shorten phase I investigations. From a conceptual perspective, they are also not capable of identifying some of the potentially most problematic regional State aid cases. Policy options are discussed.

The goal of this paper is to quantitatively account for the negative relationship between body mass and socioeconomic status observed among women in the U.S. Almost 1 out of 3 white women in the U.S. are currently obese, and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) show that, at age 30, obese women have completed almost 1 fewer school grade, are less likely to participate in the labor market, and if they work they have wages that are lower by 17%; they are more likely never to have been married and, if they are married, their spouses have earnings that are lower by 27%. I interpret these facts taking into consideration that not only body mass may affect labor- and marriage-market opportunities but also: (a) behavioral factors, potentially influenced by schooling attainment and family income, play a key role in the accumulation of body weight; and (b) women may be heterogeneous in terms of their propensity to gain weight on the one hand and labor- and marriage-market endowments on the other hand. To this end, I specify and estimate a dynamic model in which: (a) wage and spousal income offers, as well as the arrival probability of marriage offers, depend on body mass; and (b) women make decisions about their body mass, labor market participation, and marital status over the life cycle. I exploit the estimated model to quantify the consequences of women’s body mass in the labor and marriage markets and answer the following questions: (a) How responsive is body mass behavior to labor and marriage-market incentives? (b) What fraction of the cross-sectional variation in body mass is explained by characteristics formed prior to leaving school? (c) What is the effect of schooling attainment on body mass and through which pathways does this effect unfold over the life cycle? (d) How effective in preventing adult obesity would be policies aimed at eliminating excess weight at the time of leaving school?