Competition Economics Summer School

Selected Topics

1. The economics of horizontal mergers: unilateral and coordinated effects
2. New developments in the theory and practice of horizontal mergers
3. Basic empirical tests of market power
4. Discrete choice demand estimation
5. Modern empirical supply side methods to assess horizontal mergers

About the Instructors

Albert Banal-Estañol (PhD, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is Associate Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, program director of the MSc in Corporate Finance and Banking at the UPF-Barcelona School of Management, affiliated Reader at City University London, visiting professor at the IFP-Energies Nouvelles in Paris and research fellow at the SP-SP Public-Private Sector Research Center at the IESE Business School. Previously, he has held teaching and research positions at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, Northwestern University in the US, University of Cambridge, UCL, and London Business School in the UK, and the University of Munich in Germany.

His research interests are in the fields of corporate finance, competition policy and market regulation, energy and the environment and innovation and entrepeneneurhsip. Albert’s research areas span across Economics, Management and Finance and his work makes use of theoretical, empirical, experimental and simulation techniques. His articles have been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals and have been financially supported by public and private sector grants.

Albert has provided consultant advice to merging companies and competition authorities (e.g. Office of Fair Trading). He has also delivered executive training courses for government agencies (e.g. UK’s Department of Trade and Industry), regulators (e.g. Ofgem) and private companies (e.g. Gaz de France). He has also collaborated in the development of master and training programmes in several African countries.

Christian Michel (PhD, University of Mannheim) is Assistant Professor at UPF and a Barcelona GSE affiliated professor. In his research, he studies topics on the border between Empirical Industrial Organization and Organizational Economics. A second strand of his research focuses on the consequences of consumer biases on market outcomes and the effectiveness of consumer protection policies.

Selected Topics

1. Understanding platform competition: theory and cases 
2. Vertical agreements in online markets
3. Recent cases of abuse of dominance in digital markets
4. Challenges for competition policy, I: big data
5. Challenges for competition policy, II: sharing economy

About the Instructors

Juan José Ganuza (PhD, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) is Professor of Economics and Business at UPF. He is Director of the Barcelona GSE Master Program in Competition and Market Regulation.

Previously, he was visiting researcher at the University California Los Angeles, and Institut D'Economie Industrielle (Toulouse).

He has published in the main international economics journals in his research field (RAND Journal of Economics, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Economics Management and Strategy, etc) as well as in general interest economics journals (such as Econometrica), law journals (such as the Journal of Legal Studies), and business publications (such as Management Science).

Prof. Ganuza has been a consultant on procurement issues for the Spanish government. He has collaborated on several books related with procurement and regulatory issues, among them, The Handbook of Procurement (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Rosa Ferrer (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is Associate Professor at UPF and a Barcelona GSE Affiliated Professor. She is affiliated with the Econometric Society, the Industrial Organization Society, the American Law and Economics Association, and the European Economic Association.

Her primary research fields are law and economics, and industrial organisation. Her work uses both empirical and applied theory to analyze social and legal problems. For instance she has studied legal challenges such as high-litigation expenses, optimal aggregation of preferences according to ideals of justice, and congestion in law enforcement. Her current research mainly focuses on consumer regulation and gender differences among high-skilled individuals.

Massimo Motta (PhD, London School of Economics and Université Catholique de Louvain) is ICREA Research Professor at UPF and Barcelona GSE Research Professor. He served as Chief Competition Economist at the European Commission's Directorate General for Competition from September 2013 to August 2016.

Professor Motta is Fellow of the European Economic Association, Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, and of CESifo, Munich, as well as member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Competition Economists, of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy at the European Commission, and of the Expert Academic Panel of Ofcom, London.

Professor Motta's main areas of research are industrial organisation and in particular competition policy, but he has also worked on international trade and multinational firms. His work, widely cited and influential, has been published in the leading international economic journals. His book on Competition Policy: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004) is the standard international reference on the economics of antitrust, and is used by teachers, scholars, and practitioners.