In recent years, a number of high-profile investigations by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition into state aid given to prominent US companies has raised questions about whether the agency may be targeting such companies unfairly. Since 2014, the Commission has found that unlawful state aid was provided to Apple, Starbucks, and Amazon, and it continues to investigate McDonald's. In a recent article, "Fiscal state aid: are US companies being unfairly targeted?" published in Global Competition Review, Analysis Group CEO Pierre Cremieux and Managing Principal Marc Van Audenrode examine whether there is any evidence to support this claim.
In the article, the authors report on their analysis of the nearly 1,600 state aid-related cases brought to the Commission's attention between January 1, 1999 and June 30, 2017, and assess whether the Commission's state aid investigations disproportionately target US companies. The authors find that, rather than disproportionately acting against US companies, the Commission appears to have become more aggressive across the board in its investigations relative to state aid.
Associated People
Marc Van Audenrode
Dr. Van Audenrode is an expert in data analysis and econometrics, labor economics, antitrust and competition policy, and public economics. He has consulted to clients - including law firms and government agencies - in Canada, the US, and Europe. Dr. Van Audenrode’s work includes developing a methodology to value desktop software; he also developed expertise valuing goods as varied as restaurant franchises, executive stock options, or smartphone features. His recent work in public economics includes evaluating the economic rent from hydroelectricity to the Canadian economy and the value of logging rights on the ancestral territory of a Canadian First Nation. In the area of labor economics, his work has included filing an expert report assessing fair compensation for Quebec provincial judges and Quebec prosecutors and advising Quebec’s commission on pay equity. Dr. Van Audenrode has filed expert reports in courts in the US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, and has testified in Canada and the US. He recently filed a report with the Amsterdam Court of Appeal in support of the settlement reached between Ageas and claimant organizations in the Fortis case, the largest settlement ever reached through the Dutch Collective Settlement Act (WCAM). Dr. Van Audenrode’s scientific research and articles have been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and trade journals. He is a coauthor of the book The Mutual Fund Industry: Competition and Investor Welfare, and is a frequent presenter at industry and academic conferences.
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