The Case for M&A: Evidence of Efficiencies in Consummated Mergers

The U.S. antitrust agencies’ new Draft Merger Guidelines reject a long-held assumption that many, if not most, mergers are procompetitive because they allow firms to fill strategic resource gaps and serve consumers more efficiently. Merger skeptics justify this position by pointing to a lack of evidence that mergers in fact result in procompetitive performance improvements. This article answers that argument by performing a literature review to collect the existing studies that have observed r