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Safe Harbors in Merger Review: A Nonparametric Approach
HUANG Kun, ZHANG Xin-zhu
（School of Economics and Business Administration, North China University of Technology） Abstract: Safe harbors benefit both the competition agency, by allowing it to focus its limited resources on more serious cases, and the merger parties, by saving them the costs of complying with the agency in cases where the proposed acquisitions are unlikely to pose anti-competitive concerns. They also increase the predictability of the merger control process. Till now, most competition agencies worldwide have imposed safe harbors based mostly on experiences but not sound econometric methodology. The paper proposes a set of safe harbors for China using the 4-digit China industry data and given probability of merger cases with anticompetitive effect, by estimating the Cumulative DistributionFunction of HHI and △HHI using the kernel smoothing method. As the merger control agency in China is drafting merger guidelines, we believe our results will provide valuable guidance to the agency.
Key words: safe harbors, merger review, nonparametric approach